Street Papers - Langara College

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LJ R
Number 12
L A N G A R A
JOURNALISM
R E V I E W
The Canadian Press
Can it survive
without CanWest?
Street Papers
Building bridges between
Vancouver’s rich and poor
Invisible Minorities
Newspapers lack colour
Future Tense
How old media can
lure young readers
The B.C. Intercollegiate Hockey League
The BCIHL is the province’s foremost option
for junior hockey players who want to
pursue their education while
continuing to play competitive,
high-calibre hockey.
• Selkirk College • Simon Fraser University
• University of Victoria • Trinity Western University
• University-College of the Fraser Valley
www.BCIHL.ca
Opportunities
Congratulations
Grad Class of 2008
Your neighbourhood...your news
2
Langara Journalism Review 2008
w w w. v a n co u r ier.c om
Reach for your
League Media Contact: Jeff Dubois
(604) 420.7406
Indie papers
and magazines
are battling
to stay above
ground in a
corporate
media
environment.
Aaron Leaf
is one of the
survivors.
See story by
Jackie Wong
on page 8
Photo By Valerie Schillaci
Contents
At A Glance
In Depth
5 Q+A
8 The New Media
Freelance foreign correspondent Dahr
Jamail on going it alone in a war zone
6 Off The Ticker
A new law to protect sources and other
news from the news world
11 Voter Funded Media
Economist Mark Latham is trying to
change media, one democracy at a time
29 Hometeam Hype
Sports reporters Iain MacIntyre and
Jonathan McDonald fess up to the
realities of locker room boosterism
38 Gender Imbalance
Why aren’t more women on top?
Want to work in independent media?
Don’t quit your day job
12 The Canadian Press
Will Canada’s first news wire survive
after losing the CanWest account?
15 Notes from Nicaragua
Neophyte reporter Greg Amos reports
back from his first foreign assignment
17 Are Newspapers Dying?
Young Canadians are forcing a change
in the print industry
On the Cover
20 Voice for the Voiceless
A revitalized Vancouver street paper
aims to employ the homeless and
inform the rich
24 Watching the Watchdog
Business reporters watch the market,
but who watches them?
26 Daly’s Day in Court
Veteran reporter John Daly breaks a
publication ban and pays the price
30 News in Full Colour
Why aren’t more visual minorities
represented in print newsrooms?
33 No Gold for the Diggers
Have news outlets stopped investing in
investigative reporting?
Cover Photography
By Marco Morelli
(LJR)
3
Editor’s message
The staff of the 2008 LJR.
Up top: Benjamin Alldritt and Shannon Sled
Bottom from left to right: Marco Morelli,
Anne Makuch, Emily Wright, Justine
Davidson, Meagan Albrechtson, Ashley Bhan,
Manisha Krishnan, Hollie Latulippe, Meghan
Dean, Valerie Schillaci and Phillip Woolgar.
Not shown: Jeff Dubois
(LJR)
THE LANGARA JOURNALISM REVIEW
An annual review of trends and issues in
Western Canadian journalism
Editor
Justine Davidson
Managing Editor
Shannon Sled
News Editor
Anne Makuch
Assistant Publisher
Meagan Albrechtson
Art Director
Meghan Dean
Dear Reader,
Thank you for picking up the 2008 Langara Journalism Review, the final project of
the Langara School of Journalism graduating diploma class.
The 14 people who put this magazine together are storytellers. Every one of us
came to journalism school because we want to tell stories. Some of us will fulfill this
dream as news reporters, sports journalists, arts or business writers. Some of us will
work in radio or television. All of us will likely work on the Internet.
For the past two years, we have been learning our craft, training for the day we
become professional journalists. That day has come, and this magazine is the proof.
The stories found here are about our new lives, about the storytelling industry we
have chosen to enter.
None of us came into journalism to get rich, but we will balance the modest pay
with our passion for expression, the long hours with a commitment to truth.We will
move away from what we know to satisfy our curiosity for other people’s stories.
Every professional journalist makes sacrifices to be a storyteller, and we will be no
exceptions.
The stories inside this magazine are about our new colleagues: their dreams, mistakes, setbacks, and successes. Their stories are a foretaste of our own. From veteran
reporters and senior editors to alternative media publishers and street vendors, each
of them has a role in bringing stories to life, just as we will.
Our magazine reflects upon some of the most pressing questions we face as new
journalists: Will we work for our principles or for our rent? What is more important,
striving for objectivity or advocating for what we believe? What does the future hold
for journalism’s long-standing institutions?
We hope you enjoy this year’s LJR. We enjoyed making it and we look forward to
meeting you in the newsroom, the press scrum and the editing booth.
Finally, we would like to give a very warm thank you to Rob Dykstra for being such
a wonderful teacher and friend. Thank you Rob, for your tireless efforts to make us
appreciate the niggling details.
—Justine Davidson
4
Production Manager
Benjamin Alldritt
Photo Editor
Marco Morelli
Chief Photographer
Valerie Schillaci
Advertising Manager
Jeff Dubois
Copy Editors
Manisha Krishnan,
Phillip Woolgar, Jeff Dubois,
Ashley Bhan, Hollie Latulippe
Page Editors
Ashley Bhan, Hollie Latulippe,
Phillip Woolgar, Marco Morelli,
Emily Wright, Meagan Albrechtson,
Benjamin Alldritt, Anne Makuch,
Shannon Sled, Justine Davidson
Contributing Writers
Anne Makuch, Jackie Wong, Greg
Amos, Ashley Bhan, Phillip Woolgar,
Benjamin Alldritt, Valerie Schillaci,
Shannon Sled, Marco Morelli, Emily
Wright, Hollie Latulippe, Justine
Davidson, Meagan Albrechtson
Contributing Photographers
Becky Lloyd, Howard Hsu
Illustrators
Caitlin Russell, Kristen Miedema
Publisher/Instructor
Robert Dykstra
Dahr Jamail
Independent Journalist
Dahr Jamail has covered the war in Iraq for four years as an independent
and unembedded journalist. He files stories for the Guardian, the Independent, BBC and others. He shares his views on the media and the war.
Q
&
A
You never attended j-school. How has that affected your work?
For starters, I didn’t have to unlearn the myth of objectivity taught in western
journalism courses, nor any of the programming that compels people to hope
to be part of the establishment media. Plus, I don’t buy the idea of
journalism as a “profession.” It was never a profession until corporations began buying up media outlets, and out of needs to consolidate and pressure from advertisers, the myth of the “professional” journalist came into being. This is also when
the myth of “objectivity” was born. I believe journalism is more of a craft or trade. Besides, it is
not rocket science, and the most important
attributes of good journalism are honesty,
integrity, compassion for who you are reporting about, and a willingness to work
hard.
You’ve been in and out of Iraq for more than
four years. What work are you most proud of?
Breaking the story of the U.S. military using White Phosphorous in Fallujah during the November 2004 siege. It was
an important story which was summarily ignored by the
Western media, and was important because it was a war
crime. Second to that, I did a report for the group Public Citizen about Bechtel’s failure to fulfill their contractual obligations of reconstructing Iraq’s water treatment infrastructure.
That report came out in Spring 2004. Today, 70 per cent of Iraqis do not have access to potable water. Third would be my book.
Do you think Americans believe what corporate media report?
Not anymore. The majority of people here, across the political spectrum, no
longer trust the corporate media. This is thanks in large part to that very
media who completely de-legitimized itself by helping the Bush administration sell this illegal war and the lies that justified it to the American people.
The problem is that most folks don’t know where to turn to get accurate
information, particularly regarding Iraq and Afghanistan.
How do you cope with losing your friends and colleagues to the war?
Tough question, because there’s no easy answer. I’ve lost a few friends,
Iraqis, that I worked with in one capacity or another, and so far the most
difficult aspect is survivor’s guilt. Why did that happen to them and not me?
Why do I get to leave there and come home, with all the comforts here, and
they could not? I talk with friends about it, and write about it, and continue
doing work to try to show people the scope of the catastrophe in Iraq.
Photo by
Howard Hsu
Robert Fisk said objective journalism is a euphemism for government
mouthpiece. Is objectivity desirable or even possible?
I agree with him. It’s a ridiculous idea to pretend that anyone, especially a
journalist in a time of war, could be objective. Show me any human who could
report on a family being slaughtered by crazed marines in Haditha and be “objective” about it, and I’ll show you someone who ought to be institutionalized.
But then that is what the corporate media wants—robots for “journalists”—
because if the myth of objectivity was truly attainable, that is what we would
have. Unfortunately, in many instances, perhaps we’re not far from that. (LJR)
5
ticker...off the ticker...off the ticker...off the ticker...o
New law to protect sources
O
Illustration by Caitlin Russell
ne of a journalist’s most important duties is to protect his or her
sources, and fulfilling that duty
repeatedly brings reporters into conflict
with the law.
Currently, there is no legislation in
place to protect journalists’ sources, but
that might soon change.
Bill C-426 is an amendment to the
Canada Evidence Act and is up for third
reading in the House of Commons.
If approved, the bill will protect journalists from being forced to reveal sources of information used in any published
material. Judges will not be able to order journalists to declare a source unless
there is no other way of identifying the
person, and the disclosure is vital to the
public interest.
Earlier this year, the Ontario Court of
Appeal overturned a contempt-of-court
charge and a $31,600 fine against Hamilton Spectator reporter Ken Peters.
In 2004 Peters had refused a court
order to reveal a confidential source.
Last Jan. 22, the Canadian Association of
Journalists intervened on his behalf.
The source, who was present at a 1995
meeting during which Peters received
sensitive documents, eventually came
forward, saving Peters a trip to jail.
The CAJ applauded the decision but
is still calling for a shield law and maintains that whistleblowers should be able
to come forward without fear of retribution. - Manisha Krishnan
Paper not amused
by cartoon column Transit board leaves reporters behind
M
edia commentator Rafe Mair is
being sued by the publisher of
The Province newspaper over a
column he wrote about two of the paper’s
political cartoonists.
Canwest Publishing alleges Mair
falsely and maliciously wrote a column
for news website The Tyee in December
of last year about a decision to no longer
carry editorial cartoons by artists Bob
Krieger and Dan Murphy in every issue.
In the column, Mair suggested Province
readers cancel their subscriptions, and
says the decision to stop running the editorial cartoons amounts to “censorship
of two journalists” who have “long held
governments’ feet to the fire.”
Two days after it was published, the
column was amended with the intent to
correct errors and then, later in the day,
was completely removed from The Tyee.
Editor David Beers published two subsequent apologies on the website.
Canwest filed a suit Jan. 29 claiming
that Mair’s column injured the Province
newspaper’s character, credit and reputation. The suit claimed Mair and The
Tyee showed malice towards Canwest
in publishing false information. The suit
names Mair and Countercurrent Media
Ltd., which operates The Tyee. No one
at The Tyee, including Mair or Beers, is
offering any further comment on the lawsuit. - Meghan Dean
6
M
etro Vancouver’s public transportation authority has left reporters stranded
curbside by agreeing to conduct most of its business behind closed doors.
TransLink’s new chairperson, Dale Parker, said the board will have “extensive public input” before decisions are made, but board meetings will likely only be
open to the public and media four times a year.
The publicly funded board was restructured late in 2007. The former board was
made up of regional politicians and most of the meetings were open to the public.
TransLink’s move to limit media access will likely leave reporters with no other option than to file regular Freedom of Information Act requests, according to Vancouver
Province reporter Frank Luba, and that means any news will be old news by the time
it gets to the public. “FOIs take a minimum of 30 days, and with delays sometimes 60
days,” said Luba. - Anne Makuch
Global to open bureaus overseas
A
t a time when more and more news go to seasoned reporters, some of whom
outlets are relying on freelance may constitute a bureau of one, Boston
said. He believes the move
and citizen jouris part of a larger industry
nalists, Global National’s
trend to put money back
decision to open four new
into foreign reporting.
foreign bureaus over the
The sites were chosen
next year is good news for
based on geography and
Canadian newshounds.
global importance, ecoThe new bureaus will
nomically and politically.
be located in London, DelBoston acknowledged that
hi, Jerusalem, and either
the continents of Africa
Shanghai or Hong Kong,
and South America are
according to Global’s exboth underreported by
ecutive producer Kenton Illustration by Caitlin Russell
Boston. All four should be up and run- North American media outlets and said
coverage of those areas is predominantning by September 2009.
Hiring at the bureaus will be done ly in the hands of freelancers and news
internally, and the nods will most likely wires. - Justine Davidson
off the ticker...off the ticker...off the ticker...off the ti
Media fueling ignorance, Tragic record
not understanding: critic set in 2007
S
everal broadcasting outlets are fact he came under a prescribed channel
facing scrutiny after a Canadian that many asylum seekers choose, and by
Radio-television and Telecommuni- leaving out essential context about laws
cations Commission complaint was filed pertaining to asylum seekers, broadcastby a group of individuals, academics, and ers have used the public airwaves to
fuel ignorance rather than to inform the
media-watch groups.
public,” said Isabel MacThe
grievance
filed
donald, communications
against CBC TV, CBC Radirector at Fairness and
dio, CKNW, CTV and Global
This
Accuracy in Reporting,
TV, alleges the broadcasters
“failed to provide accurate,
complaint seeks a media watch group
comprehensive, fair, full, and
to hold the news based in the United
States.
unbiased coverage when they
media to its
Dr. Fiona Jeffries,
reported that Laibar Singh
an instructor at Simon
‘came to Canada illegally’ or
public
Fraser University’s comthat he ‘was illegal’ in Canaresponsibility
munications department
da prior to taking sanctuary
FIONA JEFFERIES
said it is imperative that
in July 2007,” according to a
Communications
the news media adhere
press release.
instructor, SFU
to its own established
The complainants say the
ethical codes of accunews reports negatively inracy and responsible refluenced public perceptions
porting.
of Singh and breached the
“This
complaint
broadcasters’ ethical code.
Singh, a paralysed refugee claimant, seeks to hold the news media to its public
sought sanctuary at a Sikh temple in responsibility,” said Jeffries.
None of the broadcast stations named
Surrey.
“By inaccurately stating that Laibar in the CRTC complaint offered comment.
Singh ‘entered Canada illegally’ when in - Anne Makuch
“
A
record 171 journalists and news
professionals died on the job in
2007. But deaths due to murder actually fell to 120 from 133 the year before,
according to the Brussels-based International News Safety Institute.
The number of reporters and support
staff who died in air and road accidents
rose from 22 to 35.
The war in Iraq once again set the
stage for “the worst single killing ground
in 2007,” as 65 news personnel died, the
institute reports.
Following Iraq, the most dangerous
countries for journalists in 2007 were
Mexico and Somalia, each reporting nine
deaths. Pakistan counted eight, while
seven media personnel died in Brazil
and six perished in Sri Lanka. The Philippines and India each accounted for five
deaths last year, while four journalists
were killed in Afghanistan and three in
Haiti.
As in past years, the majority of casualties were local reporters working on
their own turf.
“The death toll is appalling, unacceptable, and getting worse,” said institute
director Rodney Pinder. - Anne Makuch
Facebook use raises sourcing concerns
A
s if it weren’t affecting our lives
enough already, Facebook is now
transforming the media.
Journalists who are members of the
online social networking site are using
it as a link to research and interview
sources for news stories.
Jeremy Nuttall, a CBC reporter and
freelance writer for the WestEnder, said
Facebook allows journalists to seek information about a community they are
not part of and know little about.
After a teen was stabbed to death
in East Vancouver, Nuttall said one of
his colleagues used the site to access
threatening messages on the teen’s wall,
revealing the event could have possibly
been gang related.
But while Facebook can be a helpful
resource, Nuttall said he has noticed an
increasing number of news stories based
solely on Facebook groups and events.
“It can be a good tool, but journalists
have to be careful not to depend on it too
much,” he said.
In January, the London bureau of the
Agence France-Presse prohibited its
reporters from using Facebook or Wikipedia as independent news sources. The
decision was made after a number of major news outlets, including the Globe and
Mail, quoted portions of Benazir Bhutto’s
son’s Facebook profile, which turned out
to be fake. To date, no Canadian media
outlet has implemented a similar ban.
- Meagan Albrechtson
Illustration by Kristen Miedema
7
MAKING IT
IN INDIE MEDIA
Some journalists prefer to work
outside the corporate box,
but at what cost?
Story by Jackie Wong // Photos by Valerie Schillaci and Marco Morelli
8
Y
ou’re fresh out of journalsm
school. You have your credentials in hand and you’re ready
to take the world of journalism
by storm. Surely, a well-paying job is just
around the corner...or not.
Graduating from j-school to the newsroom is not as easy as it appears, and
many grads end up abandoning their
journalistic aspirations before they’ve
begun.
I recently witnessed a typical casualty. He had all—or more—of the official certifications required to work in
media. He had earned a bachelor’s of
science and a master’s of neuroscience
followed by a master’s degree in journalism. After a couple of local internships, it
would seem that a paying job in journalism would be easy to come by. But as we
know, the world can be a cruel place and
it was only after a grueling, six-month
job search that our protagonist landed a
job … in science research.
He summed up his decision to abandon the industry in two words: “Fuck
journalism.”
W
hen the going gets tough and
the bills need paying, it seems
that many would-be reporters
link arms with journalism’s rich cousin,
public relations.
“All my writer friends have moved on
to full-time communications positions,”
says Spike Chilton, a communications assistant at the Canadian Cancer Society.
Chilton, 36, resigned his post as editor of
Discorder magazine when he was offered
his current communications job.
“Getting by wasn’t in the cards,” he
says of his financial situation at Discorder, a
25-year-old music and
culture publication put
out by UBC campus radio station CiTR. In order to make ends meet,
Chilton took on more
and more small jobs,
but says ultimately his
work for everyone suffered.
Chilton holds a BFA
in creative writing from
the University of Victoria and a broadcast
journalism certificate
from BCIT. He started
freelancing for Vancouver’s alternative
print publications immediately after
finishing his undergrad in the late ‘90s.
Writing credits include the now-defunct
Terminal City Weekly, the Vancouver
Courier, and the Georgia Straight, among
others. Burnt out from the low pay and
unstable employment that comes with
freelancing to independent outfits, Chilton eventually eased up on writing in favour of salaried living.
“I continue to pitch freelance submissions, but not with as much gusto as in
my younger writerly days,” says Chilton.
“I guess these days a medical plan and
vacation days are more important than
writing about stuff that relatively few
people care about.”
F
or the relative few who continue to
write about the offbeat “stuff” that
Chilton left behind, getting paid for
your passions remains an uphill battle.
Enter Graeme Worthy. He’s the kind of
guy who describes himself as excitable,
and he is—his enigmatic smile hints
at a mischievious
mind. He has the
quick reflexes and
devil-may-care attitude that come
with a lifetime of
bike commuting.
At 29, Worthy
has no formal training in journalism.
Most of his newspaper experience is
drawn from unpaid
involvement with
UBC student papers, the Ubyssey
and Discorder.
“At no point
was I there for the cash,” he says. “I was
kind of there because I liked projects.”
Worthy’s volunteer work at student
papers left him with editing, design and
web production skills that landed him
paid work in web design and computer
programming down the road. In spring
2006, he had saved up enough money
from a computer programming gig to
launch Tooth and Dagger, a Vancouverbased alternative newspaper.
Laying out and editing each issue on his home computer, Worthy
paid for the production of the paper
out of his own pocket. Tooth and Dagger quickly gained momentum as
a prominent new local publication
with a strong stable of young writers.
Worthy started Tooth and Dagger because he felt alternative voices were
missing from Vancouver media.
“I didn’t like the papers that were
around,” he says. “I thought the Terminal City was really the greatest paper
and I missed it. That was the paper that
represented me the best in the city.”
Terminal City
Weekly was a free
alternative paper
that
suspended
publication in fall
2005. No official
explanation was
ever given for its
demise, but it was
speculated
that
under-financing
played a starring
role.
Worthy was inspired by the offbeat features like
the dollar pizza
reviews and geek
columns that the
new Terminal City
ran — grittier,
funnier stuff than
what was found in
other mainstream
papers.
With the start
of Tooth and Dagger, Worthy set
about producing a paper that
would reflect the quirks and passions of a demographic not served
by Vancouver’s existing papers.
He ran stories about the daily
life of bike couriers, urban gardeners, computer recyclers, and
people who foraged road kill for
food, alongside regular brunch
reviews and news commentary.
Worthy wanted to create the work environment of his dreams — a community-minded, creative space where people
could talk about the city they loved, and
how they could make it better.
9
After producing 12 issues at about $548
per run, Worthy halted publication of
Tooth and Dagger in January 2008. The
paper had run out of resources, both of
the financial and human variety.
“Way to go Vancouver,” wrote Sean
Orr in a blog post at BeyondRobson.
com after Tooth and Dagger announced
its last issue. “You’ve lost another one.
Once again a small group of independent
minded, creative people have failed to
gain enough ad revenue to keep a print
publication alive.”
Tooth and Dagger was not alone in its
demise. It went down alongside independent rock magazine the Nerve. After 10
years of national print distribution,
the Nerve opted for an online-only
edition within days of Tooth and
Dagger closing its doors.
But Worthy, no stranger to juggling unpaid work with supplementary employment, says although
a shortage of funds contributed to
Tooth and Dagger’s death, it didn’t
kill the publication.
Despite a strong team of voluntary contributors, Worthy was
hard-pressed find people who were
as emotionally invested in Tooth
and Dagger as he was. Most contributors were non-professional writers
with day jobs. After all, Worthy was
interested in having people share
experiences that lay outside of journalism.
“I want everybody to be dilettantes,” Worthy says. “I think that
dilettante-ism is good, and so most
of the projects I’ve ever worked on
are non-paid. And maybe that’s the
reason why I’m poor. But I kind of
do things I’m interested in rather
than things that pay me money. And
that’s maybe not the best economic
strategy but it is a really fulfilling
strategy. And if one in 10 projects
pays you, then I’m kind of pleased
with that.”
nalism primed him for work in big media
from the get-go, so his current work on
a smaller magazine such as Ricepaper
makes him somewhat of an anomaly
compared with the rest of his graduating
class.
“Ryerson really sees itself as a farm
team beating the industry,” he says, adding that most of the friends he graduated
with now have full-time salaried jobs in
journalism.
“I think in Toronto there’s a lot of
people who think of themselves as on a
professional track. In Vancouver, a lot of
people see [journalism] as a hobby.”
Leaf moved back to Vancou-
S
T
he business of running a
newspaper is seldom taught
in journalism schools, but for
new media entrepreneurs, business
smarts are crucial to success.
“I never came into this intending
to be administrative in any way, be
a leader in any way,” says Aaron Leaf, a
23-year-old Ryerson University journalism graduate and editor of Vancouver’s
Ricepaper magazine. “Now I find myself
needing to organize people.”
Leaf’s undergraduate degree in jour-
10
banquet server at the Pan Pacific hotel
while he works on Ricepaper, a 13-yearold literary magazine originally intended
for Asian-Canadians.
Since becoming involved with Ricepaper about a year ago, Leaf has worked to
reshape the magazine’s content to reflect
the changing interests of its readership.
“The magazine has to be focused on
being a good magazine, as opposed to being the mouthpiece of [the Asian Canadian Writer’s Workshop],” he says.
Leaf and co-editor Herman Cheng
have rebuilt the infrastructure of the
magazine to allow for a broader range of
contributors.
Leaf is now paid regularly for his
work at Ricepaper. Still, the wages
aren’t enough to pay the rent so he
supplements his income by waiting
tables. At one point, he says “I went
for eight months with no pay whatsoever with this vague idea that I’d
be getting some sort of compensation.”
“Things are looking really good,”
he says. “It’s that weird thing where
you stick around enough, all of a
sudden it starts happening.”
ver after completing his degree and
considers himself the black sheep of his
journalism class—he’s neither working
full-time in the Toronto area, nor is he
moving up the corporate media ladder.
Instead, he’s supporting himself as a
urviving lean periods through
odd jobs and fragmentary work
isn’t for everyone. But if there’s
hope for independent journalists,
a lot of that hope lies in sticking
around.
Worthy’s advice to aspiring journalists: Get off the couch.
“Do it. Do it with whatever means
you have. If nobody wants to publish
your work, publish it. If there’s not a
paper to publish your work in, make
your own paper. If it costs $1,000 to
print your newspaper, try to find
someone to help share the costs of
the thing.”
If gumption and elbow grease are
ingredients for success, so is failure.
“Suck. It’s super important to suck.
‘Cause you’re gonna. Badly. And
that’s totally okay,” Worthy says.
“Getting hate mail is the best thing
you can have. That means you win.”
Hate mail collections aside, making it in journalism requires motivation and tenacity. Even with the
right credentials, there is no guarantee of that big journalism job.
But Leaf says it could be closer than
you think.
“If you live in Vancouver, it seems a
million miles away, a million contacts
away. But it’s really not.” (LJR)
VOTE ME THE MONEY!
Story by
Benjamin Alldritt
What if readers decided
how much journalists got paid?
B
etter media help voters make
better decisions, and a Vancouver-based economist has a plan
to give voters more power to
improve the media.
Mark Latham is the creator
of Voter-Funded Media, or
VFM. Put simply, VFM is
a way for voters to award
funding to the media outlets that have served them
best. It’s already up and
running at the University
of B.C. and Simon Fraser
University student unions,
and Latham is working to
introduce it at several college campuses in the Lower
Mainland.
“I had long had this feeling
that I wanted to change the
world – save the world!” says
Latham, who has put up more
than $16,000 of his own money
to prove that the concept works.
Raised in Burnaby, Latham earned
degrees in math and business at UBC
before going on to complete a PhD in finance at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology’s prestigious Sloan School of
Management.
Latham taught finance at Berkeley
though the ‘80s, and it was in the summer of 1988 that he first had the idea that
led to VFM. At the time, it was focused on
improving corporate governance.
“I think it would be very beneficial,”
he wrote to a colleague, “to have a consulting firm hired directly by the shareholders. They would be an independent
monitor of management, with no executive power except to spend a limited budget authorized by the shareholders.”
The idea raised a few eyebrows, but
went nowhere. In the meantime, Latham
left Berkeley to work on Wall Street for
heavyweights such as Salomon Brothers
and Merrill Lynch. Six years in the trading capital left him with considerable fi-
nancial freedom and a renewed interest
in corporate governance.
“In the power structure of corporations, I had seen some things that looked
not good, and I had an idea on how to fix
them.”
Latham’s idea was for a company’s
shareholders to keep a modest amount
of money out of the control of company
management. Independent consulting
firms would fight for the job of scrutinizing the management, and would be
paid out of the shareholders’ money. The
competition would encourage the consultants to bring the shareholders quality
information. And better-informed share-
holders, Latham argued, would be better
equipped to vote on their management’s
performance.
Fast forward to the year 2000. Latham
has pitched his idea to more than a
dozen companies, and has been
turned away by every one.
Celebrity businessmen
Warren Buffett and Bill
Gates both wrote to their
shareholders to advise
against adopting Latham’s
proposal.
“I was disappointed,”
he says, “so I started shifting my focus a bit, realizing
there was a parallel issue in
democracies.”
Latham retooled his idea,
with voters replacing shareholders, media outlets replacing consultants, and government replacing management.
He also decided to put up his
own money to prove it would work.
Now living back in Vancouver, Latham
dubbed his plan “Turbo Democracy,” and
took it to UBC’s student government, the
Alma Mater Society, in 2006.
“Student unions being about the
smallest scale democracy which is still
big enough that you see quite a disconnect between the elected council and the
average voter,” explains Latham.
“Well, the first thing they said to me
was ‘Get rid of that name!’” he recalls,
laughing. Newly christened as VoterFunded Media, Latham’s idea was finally
put into action during the January 2007
Alma Mater Society elections, nearly 20
years after he first proposed it.
“As a candidate, I found it wholly unpleasant,” says Matthew Naylor, who was
running for AMS Vice-President at the
time. “Questions were asked of me that
wouldn’t have been asked otherwise. We
had more coverage, and more diverse
coverage than we’ve had in the past.”
(continued on page 37)
11
Story and photo
by Marco
Morelli
A
knock at the glass enclosure that
separates The Canadian Press’
Vancouver bureau from the outside world does little to catch the attention of the few staff members milling
about the newsroom. The office is surprisingly quiet, with only three bodies
answering phones, watching television
screens and banging out copy on computers. For the news wire’s newly appointed
Vancouver bureau chief, Wendy Cox, it’s
a different story. Her telephone is ringing off the hook and piles of paper overflow off her desk. When she finally hangs
up the phone, she takes a deep breath to
calm herself and sits down. “It’s been an
unusual year,” Cox says.
She explains that since she took over
the bureau chief position last summer
“the news cycle has been unusually punishing.” Cox and her team of editors and
reporters are responsible for getting
all the local, national and international
news to the news wire’s 100 or so member newspapers, TV and radio stations
and Internet news outlets. Although the
sheer number of front-page stories coming out of Vancouver has been extremely
high this year, not all the added pressure
on the bureau can be blamed on that
alone. Forget the fact that there are only
10 full-time and one part-time staffer. Or
12
ither
The
C anadian
P ress ?
the fact that one of those full-timers was sent to Afghanistan for a good chunk of the
year. The biggest reason the bureau is facing an uphill battle this year is because
Canada’s largest newspaper chain, Canwest Global Communications Corp., pulled its
membership from The Canadian Press wire service.
On June 30, 2007, Canwest, the owner of more than 10
daily newspapers in Canada including the Vancouver Sun,
The Province and the Victoria Times Colonist, cancelled
its membership with The Canadian Press to form its own
wire service based in Ottawa.
The move means a loss of $4.6 million in fees for The Canadian Press, which represents approximately 10 per cent of it’s annual budget and takes away most of Vancouver’s major daily news providers from the news-sharing service itself. In addition
to cancelling its membership, the news giant last February announced the opening
of the Canwest News Service. The service does not only produce Canwest generated
content for news outlets already in the Canwest chain, but sells content to other media outlets in direct competition to The Canadian Press.
In an attempt to boost its brand image since the departure of Canwest, The Canadian Press has advised its members to use the company’s full name, instead of the
well-known abbreviation CP.
Created in 1917 to distribute news coming back from the First World War to newspapers across Canada, The Canadian Press quickly grew and transformed its identity
from a news distributor to a full news service that produced original copy for its
member newspapers. In 1924, The Canadian Press was credited with building telegraph lines linking Eastern and Western Canada and opening communication from
coast to coast. Now, in 2008, the national wire service and its 250 journalists work in
bureaus in most major Canadian cities distributing news stories, photographs, audio and video clips and Internet-based copy to media outlets across the country and
abroad.
The loss of Canwest has forced the wire service to make changes in how it operates in all Canadian cities. But the Vancouver bureau has felt its impact harder than
most. “Canwest pulling out is an acute issue in Vancouver because all other cities in
The Canadian Press’
Vancouver bureau
chief Wendy Cox is
adjusting to life after
the Canwest pullout.
“
Canada have non-Canwest papers,” Cox explains. The hardest hit since the loss of
Canwest has been to The Canadian Press reporters, due to the added workload and
pressure of getting stories that would have been previously picked up from the Sun
or The Province. The bureau is much busier, and it frustrates Cox. “We get our butts
kicked on certain kinds of stories. The gang war is a tough story for us to keep up
with. We just don’t have a reporter dedicated to working the copy.”
Although providing other member news outlets with Vancouver stories has proven
to be challenging, Cox feels it has made the bureau stronger and forces her team to be
sharper. “Our people do a remarkable amount of work. They work their tails off.” She
says many of the staff took the pullout personally. “It’s injected a level of competition we
never had before. I think it’s a good thing.”
Competition has prompted the bureau to form stronger alliances with remaining
members such as The Globe and Mail. The relationship between the two has become
much tighter and they rely on each other more for stories that have importance to all British Columbians, not just Vancouver readers. Before Canwest cancelled its membership,
the cooperative was not privy to The Globe’s B.C. copy. Cox says, “We now rely on the
Globe in a way that probably exceeds the way we relied on the Canwest papers for local
stories.” In wake of the loss of the Victoria Times Colonist, the Vancouver bureau has also
formed a relationship with westcoaster.ca, an online paper out of the West Coast resort
town of Tofino. Cox credits the small Internet-based outlet with keeping The Canadian
It’s injected a
level of
competition
we never had
before. I think
it’s a good
thing.
”
13
Press alive on Vancouver Island. “It’s not a relationship we would have had before.
This has really made us think outside the box and form better relationships with
smaller papers.”
The initial threat by Canwest to pull its membership from The Canadian Press
came in 2006, when an internal strategic review was released based on five months
of discussion among The Canadian Press’ members about its structure. Canwest disagreed with the other members about the direction in which the cooperative was
going. The Winnipeg-based media giant wanted a complete change in the structure
and only wanted to pay for stories it picked up. The current structure offers only two
types of memberships. One for smaller newspapers, called NewsStream and one for
larger newspapers called Datafile, which provides more of the wire service’s original
copy.
The Canadian Press was under the gun once before. In
1996, Southam Inc., the former newspaper giant now owned
by Canwest, threatened to pull out its newspapers from the
co-op. Though Southam eventually backed down, it took
The Canadian Press massive restructuring and staff cuts
to recover from the fallout. Now 10 years later, the news
wire is faced with a similar challenge.
To maintain the extensive news coverage that, in large part, was previously provided by Canwest’s Vancouver Sun and The Province, The Canadian Press will need
to fill a few gaps. But that will not be easy when the wire service’s total annual operating budget has only grown from $46 million to $48 million in the last 10 years. Although there are no plans to hire new staff to cope with the added workload since the
Canwest pullout, there has not been a significant reduction in staff. Cox emphasizes
“the bureau is not going to lose any jobs like in 1996. We have no plans for lay-offs but
we’re certainly not going to get bigger.”
The distribution and production of online copy, audio and video are becoming
increasingly important in journalism, and The Canadian Press now provides more
of these multi-format news forms than ever before. With newspapers, broadcasters
and online outlets fighting for the same audience, the responsibilities for a Canadian
Press reporter have expanded from simply writing copy. The days of sitting back and
waiting for the local dailies to file their stories are over.
Camille Bains, a reporter for The Canadian Press for the past eight years, says
“When you’re trying to do everything—processing audio, trying to get your quick hit
out, trying to write your story, and at the same time shooting video—you wish you
had four arms. You don’t have much time to do the story you were trained to do. Now
you’ve got this other stuff to deal with.”
According to Bains, the loss of Canwest has created some much-needed competition. “Competition is good in this business,” she says.
Having worked under the deadline pressure of a newspaper and now for The Canadian Press, Bains believes the new competitiveness sparked by the pullout will work
to her newsroom’s advantage.
“For us it’s a group effort. It’s a cultural difference between Canwest and us.” One
advantage the cooperative has over Canwest is that their reporters are constantly
filing stories throughout the day, not just once. “We’re just doing more of it than they
are, and faster than ever before,” Bains says.
Although editors and reporters at The Canadian Press’ Vancouver bureau are
shouldering the bulk of the added workload, they welcome the challenge. The competitive nature of journalism is alive and well these days around Vancouver. Bains
says there is a sense of pride amongst the staff in the newsroom. “The reporters
around the city all respect each other; we all know we have a job to do. But at the end
of the day, we want to be better than the other person.”
Cox doesn’t deny Canwest’s exit has hurt the wire service, but maintains her bureau has improved since the pullout. “We’ve gotten better since we lost them, but
we’d rather have them. Canadians as a whole are better served by having the entire
co-op intact.” (LJR)
14
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Potholes and pitfalls
Lessons learned by a rookie reporter
on assignment in Nicaragua.
Story and photos by Greg Amos
Greg Amos is a 2007 graduate of Langara College’s School of Journalism and the first winner of the CIDA-Langara
Journalism International Development Scholarship, which provided him with funds and support to research and write
on a Canadian international development project abroad. He is now a reporter for the Coast Reporter in Sechelt.
I
was just beginning my interview
with Luis Felipe Morales, mayor of Moyogalpa, a small town in southern Nicaragua, when I realized I might have said
too much.
“I’m not aware of this project. There’s
Canadian money involved?” he asked me,
leaning closer to listen to my answer.
I was surprised he knew nothing about
Produmer, a $2.8 million Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)
funded project aimed at diversifying agriculture across Nicaragua. After all, the
project’s sesame farmers here on Isla de
Ometepe, a spectacular island-in-a-lake
formed from two volcanoes, had been the
most successful than in any other part of
Nicaragua.
The mayor’s ignorance was a sudden
reminder of what country I was in. Nicaragua ranks 123rd out of 179 nations rated
in Transparency International’s 2007 corruption index. It’s rarely clear who will
benefit from a development project in
the long term.
Produmer, organized by the Mennonite Economic Development Associates
(MEDA) on CIDA’s behalf, has been helping sesame farmers grow high-quality,
15
sustainable sesame crops and find ways
to sell those crops internationally since
2001. I spent most of August visiting
farmers in towns scattered throughout
the Occidente, the Pacific coastal plains
of Nicaragua, to learn about their experiences under the project.
Reporting on this project wasn’t easy.
Commuting along hurricane-thrashed
highways is one thing, but the struggle
to get honest quotes, and tell the story in
a way the average Canadian cares about
was the real challenge. It’s good to pay attention to a project’s results, but I learned
it’s more important to be resourceful in
overcoming cultural obstacles.
Chances are good that upon arriving
in a developing country, a rookie journalist will experience a heady combination
of professional uncertainty and culture
shock. I felt both when flying into Managua, the nation’s capital, in the midst
of an electricity crisis. It quickly became
apparent I was entering the second-poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.
Looking down on the city of 1.7 million
was like looking into a dark and abandoned church, with a few candles left
burning in the tabernacle.
In the daylight, it’s a decidedly less
sacrosanct place. Managua is a noisy city
whose natural state seems to be disrepair, thanks in part to Hurricane Mitch in
1998 and a powerful earthquake in 1972.
Pollution seems to stick to your forehead
in the muggy heat. In the middle of busy
streets, old tires warn drivers of uncovered manholes whose lids were stolen
for scrap metal.
But the real reporting work took place
in smaller towns like El Sauce, Malpaisillo, and Cosiguina, all less than a few
hours drive by a pothole-ridden highway
from Leon. Farmers I spoke with on the
verdant countryside ranged from being
dirt poor to relatively comfortable, but
all were unfailingly humilde — polite
and humble.
16
I had a translator, but tried to
speak as much
Spanish as possible. There’s nothing like
stumbling attempts at a foreign language
to help narrow the cultural gap.
While my various translators were
great guys, working with them imposed
limits I hadn’t expected. At times, I could
tell answers were being vastly simplified
for me — I had to keep reminding them
not to paraphrase too much. I was already
losing some context through translation,
and I needed direct, emotive quotes.
Answers tended to lead back to the
need for more funding to keep the project going. And it was pretty much expected that lunch was on me. But that
was alright — eating unnamable food
with the local muchachos, whether they
were simple farmers or former Contras,
was a great way to bring down barriers.
When I returned to El Sauce later that
month for a follow-up interview, farmers
were much more willing to share their
insights.
The project’s agricultural experts
acted as my guides in each rural community, and put me in touch with the farmers — a selection process that I realize
in hindsight might have catered to their
own agenda of getting good press. Farmers seemed especially guarded when
these specialists sat in on my interviews,
making it tricky to craft questions that
would unlock honest answers.
Dealing with corruption is a part of
life in Nicaragua, but poor farmers aren’t
always innocent. A co-op in Malpaisillo
tried to trick their buyers into paying a
high price for non-organic sesame, and
when it didn’t work, have me report
they were cheated. The incident kept me
aware of the need to stay vigilant and
avoid reporting hearsay.
I sought out aspects of the project that
would resonate with Canadian readers.
Taxpayers in Canada would appreciate
Produmer’s business-like approach, and
the fact that slackers aren’t tolerated.
Eco-conscious Vancouverites would be
pleased to read the project is pushing
organic sesame as a crop to replace the
chemical-intensive cotton plantations so
prevelant in the 1980s.
Nicaraguans know their political support often determines whether they receive government help. Produmer could
have been seen as part of that partisan
system, explaining why farmers were
careful to self-censor any comments negative towards MEDA.
Many rural people support president
Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista government,
and socialist election slogans aren’t hard
to find painted on walls in most towns.
Framed pictures of Ortega and Che Guevara look down paternally from the mayor’s office in Malpaisillo.
It was sometimes a challenge to focus
on the small project I was covering, instead of the country’s intriguing political
history. The Sandinistas were in power
from 1979 to 1990, a period marked by
great promise of social revolution, by
turmoil and war against the U.S.-backed
Contras. After 15 years on the sidelines,
the Sandinistas are now running the
country again.
Along the roadside, giant pink billboards feature a larger-than-life Ortega
exhorting social revolution with a fist
raised in triumph: Arriba los pobres
del mundo! (Rise up, poor people of the
world!) It’s a slogan some Nicaraguans
scoff at, noting they can’t rise up with
constant power shortages and a lack of
rural infrastructure necessary to bring
water to farms.
It makes the smaller stories — such as
how foreign aid is helping local farmers
buy into something that could mean lasting change — worth telling. (LJR)
RETHINKING
YOUTH
READERSHIP
STORY BY SHANNON SLED
PHOTO BY MARCO MORELLI
Y
oung Canadians are
forcing
print-oriented news outlets
across the country
to step back and re-think the way they’ve
been targeting readership. With so many
options, especially the Web, the young
hip crowd is tuning out newspapers more
than ever before. What, if anything, are
traditional print outlets doing to lure
them back?
A study done by Claire Boily for the
Canadian Media Research Consortium in
2005, shows 39 per cent of those aged 18
to 34 regularly follow the news. She also
reported that the rate of newspaper readers aged 18 to 24 is dropping. In 1998, 56
per cent of that group read newspapers
compared to 45 per cent in 2004.
A statement by the Canadian
Newspaper Association enforces Boily’s
findings. “If young people have not
The most coveted
consumers aren’t
buying newspapers. What is
journalism’s oldest medium doing
to capture the 20-somethings?
become newspaper readers by age 24,
they are unlikely to become readers later
in life.” So what’s turning them off?
According to Boily, the first strike
against big media is corporate ownership.
Big is perceived as bad. Her report
states: “This media concentration is
perceived as very high in North America
and the print media as well as television
appear to be especially affected by
this convergence, which ultimately
undermines information quality.”
Boily’s findings show young people
aren’t satisfied with what big news
corporations are trying to feed them.
Her study shows that 76 per cent of
young Canadians believe the media
are influenced by powerful members of
society and 57 per cent are concerned
about concentration of ownership. One
young woman was quoted in the report
as saying, “I feel like our generation is
jaded by the media, because you see fake
news sources and who owns what paper.
We are a lot more aware of that now, they
are like the enemy.”
The local community papers seem
to fare somewhat better. According to a
study done three years ago by ComBase,
the research component of the Canadian
Community Newspapers Association,
young people are actually picking up the
local papers.
The study showed sixty eight per cent
of Canadians aged 18 to 34 read their
weekly community papers compared to
34 per cent who read the dailies. In B.C.,
they found that 30 per cent of readers
aged 18 to 34 read only their community
newspapers.
If the big media are perceived as not
trustworthy, it’s no surprise that many
young peole are seeking out alternatives.
In Vancouver, The Georgia Straight has
17
long represented an alternative voice, in
part, based on the mythology of its ‘60s
iconoclasm, but also because of its independence from big corporations.
The Straight is in itself a corporate
entity, appearing to make big bucks from
pages and pages of ads and relatively
little editorial copy, apart from the extensive entertainment listings. But young
people would much rather turn to its
cleverly written news and entertainment
columns, than those of Vancouver’s dailies, the Sun and The Province.
John Burns, former senior producer
of of Straight.com and now book editor
of the Georgia Straight, believes independent news matters to young people.
“As the ownership of media continues
to converge into a few large companies,
an alternative perspective rooted in our
community becomes more and more important.”
So it’s not that young readers aren’t
hungry for information; in fact it’s quite
the opposite, but they’ve acquired a taste
for independent news and they want
more.
In television, the indicators are similar. While Boily’s data shows that youth
aged 18 to 24 spend most of their time in
front of the TV, the local news at six isn’t
what they’re watching. With the call of
an eagle at 11:30 p.m. the voice of Stephen
Colbert gives young people every piece
of political news they feel they need. The
Colbert Report dishes out news with a
side of sarcasm, which seems to be the
right recipe for the young, who are ever
sceptical of the status quo. While the
show deals mainly with American politics, Colbert is much-watched and talked
about by the young crowd in Canada.
The Internet is another prime reason
newspapers could be facing a potentially slow and painful death? In an age
of instant gratification, what could be
more convenient than sitting down at a
computer and having instant access to
whatever news you feel like reading? In
fact, young people already spend much of
their time on the Internet so news is just
a click away.
As Burns says, “If you don’t put yourself in people’s way — if you don’t make
yourself relevant to their daily lives —
why would they pick up a newspaper?
The Internet is right there on their computer.”
Boily’s research confirms that the primary reasons Canadian youths turn to
the Internet: It offers the most immediate and up-to-date information, it’s fast,
abbreviated, widespread, and allows you
to read only what you want, for free.
18
One person interviewed for her report summed it up: “People who know
[they] only have to press two or three buttons to get the news aren’t going to
go out and buy it [the newspaper].”
Big media outlets are certainly aware of this phenonmenon, and are scrambling to win young people over by offering news online. “We want young people to read our paper either on the web or in print,” says Ros Guggi, deputy
editor of The Province. “The challenge we face in attracting young readers is
shared by newspapers across North America.”
While most dailies are putting more energy and resources into their websites in an efort to attract more readers, especially the young, Boily says it
may hurt them in the end. By encouraging readers to seek news online, newspapers in turn are discouraging them from picking up the paper. Revenues
from online advertising still falls below that from print so this could be a double-jeopardy scenario: Reduced newspaper circulation means less ad revenue
and online revenues don’t make up the difference.
And then there are the online news competitors, such as the Tyee and
NowPublic and the so-called citizen journalism sites, such as Orato. Not only
are young people reading these sites, they are also writing for them. Lisa
Manfield, the Tyee’s marketing coordinator, says, “People love the kind of
in-depth investigative analysis that we offer. They recognize that the kind
of journalism we are providing is necessary, and that few media outlets are
doing it anymore.”
Burns, who has plenty of experience working with the web, knows it’s not
just a matter of providing web surfers with information; it’s finding ways to
connect with them and having them connect with one another.
“For years, I wrote and edited stories, then shipped them off into the world.
The only feedback was anecdotal or letters to the editor. With the Internet,
you can watch the numbers in real time, and you can converse with users the
same way. It’s very exciting.”
The big, unionized dailies face other hurdles. Many newsrooms carry an
aging staff. Senior editors who make the news decisons are unable to tap
into young minds. Those who are only a few years away from retirement are
sometimes reluctant to embrace the new Web technology. Management is
sometimes hobbled by a head-office agenda or by union contracts.
Smaller, independent media have none of these problems. “We’re hiring
young people in junior roles and as news writers, which can only help make
the paper more interesting to fellow youth,” says The Straight’s Burns.
The Tyee is also finding ways to bring young minds into the mix. “We also
involve student interns in our day-to-day operations and they have a good
sense of how to reach youth,” Manfield said.
There is plenty of speculation on what will happen to newspapers in the
future. It’s doubtful they will become extinct, but if they fail to reach out to
younger readers, no one is going to reach back.
“There’s so much talk about the death of newspapers, and the sunset of
the industry,” Burns says. “I think the bloom is off the rose for the Internet,
though. I think that we love our time online and we’ve maybe glutted enough
on the all-you-can-eat aspect. Perhaps what comes next is the desire to see
quality online. For newspapers, it may be that users or readers will appreciate
the curatorial aspect of the publication, and by whatever means they interact
with the content, they’ll want a depth of experience that goes beyond endless
ill-informed threads and blog rants.”
Young people have news and information options that previous generations
did not. The newspaper, according to most evidence, is not the primary option
for the majority of young readers, and their news-consuming habits formed
today will likely carry over into their mid-life years. (LJR)
“
We want young
people to read
our paper
either on the
web or in print.
The challenge
we face in
attracting
young readers
is shared by
newspapers
across North
America.
”
19
Won
ords
treet
S
the
Story by Justine Davidson
Photos by Marco Morelli and Valerie Schillaci
o
20
utside the liquor store on the corner of
Broadway and Maple in Vancouver, a
man named Richard is selling newspapers. His round, mocha-coloured face
shines out from beneath a navy blue beret worn at a jaunty angle over springy
salt-and-pepper hair, he carries a toque
in his pocket in case it gets cold. He has
shiny white teeth and if you shake his
hand, you’ll find his palm warm, dry and
leathery.
Beside Richard sits a small black
boom box, and from it floats the crackling strains of a much-played Miles Davis tape. It begins to rain and he covers
himself with a large plaid golf umbrella
– the expensive kind with a steel tip and
carved wooden handle. Nothing he has is
new, but it is all clean and of good-quality. He wears a warm jacket, sturdy shoes,
and lined gloves to protect his hands
from the late winter chill. He is smiling
and calling out to passersby.
“Get your copy of Street Corner,” he
says in his booming baritone voice.
The first time I spoke to Richard was
on a brisk spring afternoon in front of the
Shoppers Drug Mart on West Broadway.
He was selling copies of a newspaper that
was hardly a newspaper at all; it was just
five or six Xeroxed pages of articles and
photographs taken from the Vancouver
Sun and stapled together along with a
title page that read The Street.
21
“Thanks,” I said, “I’ve already got one
from you this week.”
“When?” he asked.
I was flustered for a moment, knowing I had been caught in a standard lie. I
stumbled over my words.
“I…I bought one from you yesterday.”
“Where?” he asked.
I pointed east.
“On Commercial Drive. On the corner
of Broadway and Commercial.”
“I wasn’t there yesterday,” he said,
matter-of-factly.
“Well,” I said, “maybe it wasn’t yesterday…”
“Anyway,” he said, ignoring my obvious embarrassment, “this edition came
out today, so you haven’t read it yet.”
Fact was, I hadn’t read a copy of The
Street for years. I used to read it when
it was a slick-looking 20-page paper,
printed on newsprint and featuring columns written by local social justice advocates and original work by professional
journalists. But the paper, sold by lowincome and homeless Vancouverites,
had suffered a major downturn and I no
longer considered it worth reading. I had
certainly bought a copy of the paper now
and then, simply to support the person
selling it. That day, I was exercising my
right as an upper-middle-class citizen to
deny charity to those who requested it.
The problem was, Richard was not asking for handouts — he was doing business.
“Here,” he said, thrusting the paper at
me with a smile. “Price is up to you. I pay
for the copying.”
I was flustered and ashamed of myself,
but I still didn’t take the proffered “No,” I
said, walking away. “No thanks.”
That was the last time I passed without buying the paper. After that, I looked
forward to seeing Richard and I was
disappointed when weeks would go by
without catching sight of him. His music
and his smile brings a liveliness to the
street rarely seen on Vancouver’s hippieturned-yuppie West Side, and now, after
nearly two decades of shifting fortunes,
the paper he sells has recovered some of
its own liveliness.
The street paper project was originally brought to life in Vancouver by journalist Michael McCarthy.
While working at a radio station in
Kelowna, McCarthy came across a story
about a street paper in New York City.
The story piqued his interest, and when
he moved back to Vancouver in 1990, he
brought the idea with him.
“Everyone that I talked to — starting
with my wife and my friends — every22
body said I was a complete idiot. They
pointed out that I had never worked on
a newspaper, that I knew nothing about
newspapers, but I figured I knew the business end of things, like where you get the
money from. But in terms of publishing a
newspaper, I didn’t know anything.”
After being told to drop the idea by his
closest friends, McCarthy went around
to various organizations on the Downtown Eastside to see if he could drum
“
Nobody wanted
the idea of hiring
panhandlers. They
said it wouldn’t
work and they
had no interest in
working with
people like that.
”
up support from those who were working on the front lines of the burgeoning
homelessness crisis in Vancouver. McCarthy doesn’t bother to hide his bitterness when he recalls their reaction to his
pitch.
“I was universally rejected by everybody that I talked to…nobody wanted the
idea of hiring panhandlers. They said it
wouldn’t work and they had no interest
in working with people like that. Everybody’s in the business of providing beds
and medical care and emergency services and nobody to this day is interested in
the concept of employment… It’s a heck
of a lot easier to say, ‘Give me funding
and we’ll house people and give them
medical care and health care and food
banks.’ Even the Salvation Army turned
me down flat.”
McCarthy says he wasn’t asking for
money, just support.
“I just basically said, ‘Would you like
to participate in any way? Would you
like stories written about what you do?
Would you like to write a column? Would
you send people from the shelter, or the
people that you work with, would you say
to them, there’s a job for you?’ And the
universal response was no interest whatsoever.”
Far from being discouraged by the
wholesale rejection he received, McCarthy took it as a sign that his idea was a
good one.
“If you read job stuff and surveys from
people who do life counselling, when you
go around and you think you have something unique and everybody says no,
then you might want to pursue it a bit
further. I knew that I was right and they
were wrong.”
With this in mind, McCarthy started
putting together the first edition of Spare
Change, so named, he says, “because I
was interested in the word change. I actually wanted to give some dignity, some
meaning, some self-respect to these people.”
He wrote some articles himself, then
went back to the people who had initially declined to support the paper and
asked for written submissions. McCarthy recalls the reaction from a prominent anti-poverty activist whom he had
approached about offering employment
to people who came to the downtown
needle exchange.
“No, you can’t put a poster up around
here. But, oh yeah, you want me to write
an opinion, well I hate the police department, blah, blah, blah.”
McCarthy found a company that
would print the first issue of the paper
for free and was almost ready to go. He
had filled 19 of 20 pages and all he needed
was a final flourish.
“I wanted to stir the pot a bit in terms
of getting some publicity. What I wanted
to do was get the mainstream papers to
pay attention to this and I didn’t want a
sympathy, feeble beggars-type pitch.”
So he made up a poster for the back
page, something for shopkeepers to put
up in their windows. It said, essentially,
that giving change to panhandlers is
not a solution to poverty. As McCarthy
puts it: “Street people need a heck of a
lot more than your 25 cents.” He listed
all of the agencies working to help Vancouver’s poor and encouraged people to
donate their time and money, rather than
just hand out coins on the street.
McCarthy’s idea worked. Whether it
was the back page poster, or simply the
concept itself, media outlets all over Canada were calling him up asking for interviews. And it wasn’t just journalists calling, it was people who wanted to work.
“I started having street people call me
here at home…and my wife said, ‘If you
ticles poached from
other
Vancouver
newspapers, along
with some games
and columns pulled
off the Internet.
This was the paper
I rarely bought and
never read when I
first met Richard.
In 2000, some of
the vendors, fed up
with the lack of consistency and quality, started up another street paper
called Street Corner. The new paper
was plagued by the
same problems as
its predecessor. No
one involved had the
time or expertise
to put out a paper
that was anything
more than a fancy
panhandling gimmick. Both papers,
however, were still
providing a vital
income stream for
those who sold it,
and through sheer
Editor Sean Condon has
determination they
brought Street Corner
kept it alive.
back to the presses.
Enter Sean ConValerie Schillaci photo
don. In the summer
of 2006, Condon
get one more of those
was working for the West Ender, a Black
phone calls from some
drunk at the bar, you’ll be living some- Press community paper serving the West
place else.’ So I rented a cubicle on Pend- End of downtown, and feeling frustrated
er Street and I put a desk in there and we that he couldn’t do more stories about
had a line-up of people around the block Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. He
started talking to friends in the business
who wanted to work.”
The first issue was published in the about what he could do and eventually
fall of 1992 and the papers were left at the struck up the conversation with Darren
Salvation Army for vendors to pick up. Atwater, a local journalist who had reThe second issue came out in January of cently taken on the role of editor at the
1993, and every two weeks after that un- Street Corner.
“It was still just photocopies at that
til 1997. After the premier issue, vendors
paid a quarter for each copy, not so much time,” says Condon of the first paper he
to cover printing costs, says McCarthy, and Atwater put out, “but it was original
but to make the paper worth something content, nothing stolen from other papers. The quality had been so poor up to
to the people who sold it.
“You can’t just give it away — it has no that point, [the vendors] were just happy
the lines were straight.”
value. Everything free is worthless.”
In September, Condon took over as
In 1997, McCarthy handed control of
the paper over to one of the vendors. “I editor and Street Corner went back to
was exhausted. I couldn’t be the den fa- the presses to become a bona fide newspaper again.
ther anymore.”
The change was a success. In NovemFor several more years, the paper, renamed The Street, existed week to week. ber 2007, the people behind Vancouver’s
Sometimes coming out on time, some- other street paper, The Street, decided to
times not. It was mostly made up of ar- join the Street Corner team.
Today, Street Corner boasts a dozen
vendors, and Condon hopes to triple that
number by the end of 2008. With more
vendors on the street, Condon wants to
see more people buying and reading the
revitalized paper. Attracting those readers, he says, is a two-part challenge.
“First, we have to raise awareness in
the city about what we are doing and why
you should buy the paper. The second is
content. We have to make sure that when
someone new buys the paper, they learn
something; they are intrigued and they
want to buy it again.”
He describes the content strategy as
“subversive.”
“People have a certain perception of a
street paper — that it is put together by
homeless people and it is all about homelessness and poverty. We are trying to
change that perception.”
He wants to attract new readers with
entertainment features, breaking news
and lighter fare such as puzzles and
horoscopes. Once people know there is
more to street papers than just stories
and news about homelessness, he says,
they will start to value it as part of their
weekly reading. He points to the Big Issue, a street paper that started in London
and has spread to Australia, Africa and
Japan, as a model.
“Anybody can pick up a copy of the Big
Issue and enjoy it for the entertainment
stories or reviews, but then they might
go on to read a vendor profile or a story
on poverty issues. It’s an easy entry point
for people to learn about poverty.”
Condon stresses the importance of the
vendors in deciding the paper’s content.
“When we started working on the
paper, they told us they wanted to keep
things like the David Suzuki column.
They know best what their customers
like about the paper.”
He says the vendors work as a bridge
between two worlds: the Downtown Eastside and the rest of the city.
“People talk about barriers to the
poor, but there are barriers on the other
side too. People are afraid to go to the
Downtown Eastside so they don’t know
what it is really like. These guys are out
there acting as ambassadors. It’s their
paper.”
While McCarthy quit the paper because he didn’t want the responsibility of being “a den-father to a bunch of
guys with serious addiction problems,”
Condon doesn’t seem overly concerned
about keeping the vendors in check.
All new vendors must sign a code of
conduct that says they must not harass
23
I
t’s a Writer’s
W
Market
Story by Phillip Woolgar // Illustration by Caitlin Russell
yng Chow was 56 when Patricia
Graham, editor-in-chief of the
Vancouver Sun, fired him for an
apparent conflict of interest involving a
story he wrote and an investment. Chow
frequently wrote about Concord Pacific
LTD., a Vancouver real estate company
that sold him a condominium in 1995.
The flooring put into the condo was different from what Chow was promised,
so he accepted a $15,000 discount for
the trouble. In 2001, Chow purchased
another condo from Concord for $39,000
below the price paid by other buyers.
When Chow appealed his dismissal
from the Sun, he told arbitrator Rory McDonald the discount was given because
of further problems with the design of
the original condo. McDonald cited several letters Chow had written to Concord
between 1997 and 1999 containing language he and Graham described as, “disgusting, unbelievable, profane, nasty and
ugly.” He concluded Chow had used his
high-profile position to demand benefits,
and the termination was upheld.
In another conflict-of-interest case, the
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accused former CBS MarketWatch
columnist Thom Calandra of promoting
23 companies from February to December 2003. The commission concluded
Calandra went beyond general market
analysis to specific stock recommendations without disclosing his investments
to his readers. When Calandra’s newslet24
ter came under the SEC investigation,
he advised CBS of his resignation. The
SEC claims Calandra purchased shares
of companies he profiled more than 100
times, netting a tidy $406,000.
That buy-write-sell pattern is called
scalping, and it begs the question: Do
businesses reporters use their power for
profit?
Many B.C. stock promoters make that
accusation against veteran Vancouver
Sun business writer David Baines, who
specializes in securities reporting. His
articles influence market prices, giving
him the opportunity to earn money off
his column. Baines has been sued unsuccessfully 18 times.
“They just go through the process,”
he says. “There are a lot of sleazy promoters out there and they can’t understand that somebody would be writing
negatively about a deal unless there was
something in it, some financial motivation. They just don’t understand that I do
this as part of my job.”
In 1998, Baines won a libel suit against
Florida securities writer George Chelekis, who accused him of generating negative news about companies to drive down
the price of shares.
“That was a big case. We sued him
and won $825,000 plus legal costs, the
second highest libel judgment in Canadian history. The irony was that the SEC
later discovered that he had been doing
exactly what he had accused me of doing:
when
business
reporters
use their
power for
profit
taking secret payments to write false
news about companies.”
On Feb. 25, 1997, the SEC filed a complaint against Chelekis accusing him of
“knowingly or recklessly making materially false and misleading statements
concerning six publicly traded companies.” The complaint also states, “Chelekis failed to disclose… that he and entities he controls… received at least $1.1
million from more than 150 issuers, and
275,500 shares of stock from 10 issuers,
as payment for recommending securities
of such issuers in [Chelekis’] Hot Stocks
publications.” Chelekis was ordered to
pay $163,000 in fines.
Baines’s newspaper, the
Vancouver Sun, has no clear
policy about reporters’ coverage and their investments.
The Sun has no mandatory
disclosure policy, nor does
any other newspaper in Canada. No specific law governs
business reporters and their
investments. This gives reporters the opportunity to
use information that is not
yet public to invest with no
fear of an audit by either
their employer or a securities
regulator. Baines says the
understanding of the conflict
among business reporters is
“a mess.”
“It’s up to reporters and
editors to be on the side of
caution,” he says. “They
should not invest into anything that comes into conflict
with their writings.”
After the experience with
Calandra,
“MarketWatch
has opted for a crackdown,”
says Steve Maich, a business writer for Maclean’s
magazine. “Staff must now
disclose all of their trading to
management, who will perform random audits. In essence, MarketWatch is creating the kind
of compliance procedures in use at many
Wall Street brokerages.”
Canada’s Business News Network also
has a written policy that requires reporters and immediate family members to
disclose their investments.
“It’s entirely appropriate to have a
policy like that because [business journalists] are reporting on day-to-day price
machinations,” Baines says.
Even though BNN and MarketWatch
are larger, more influential outlets, he
says, “There should also be some mecha-
nism for monitoring investments at the
Vancouver Sun in case any questions
come up. An editor should be able to
make some random checks to see if the
reporter is in any conflict or potential
conflict.”
Valerie Casselton, the Vancouver
Sun’s executive editor, says creating a
mandatory disclosure policy is unnecessary. Casselton says she should simply
“trust reporters to do what is right.”
Baines considers his investments to
be an “open record for serious inquiries
to dispel any possible confusion over this
issue.”
“If any questions came up, I would
open my books to my editors so that they
could review this,” he says.
Baines writes about companies on the
TSX Venture exchange, which includes
junior companies, and to minimize any
potential conflict he says his only investments are in large companies listed on
the TSX, NYSE and NASDAQ, over which
his writings have little influence. He willingly provides a list of his current stock
investments, and while there were no apparent conflicts with his writings, there
is, as he concedes, no guarantee that it
is a complete display of all his financial
interests. As he acknowledges — and reinforcing his point about lack of controls
— he may well have secret foreign accounts, far beyond the reach of employers and security regulators.
The B.C. Securities Commission monitors financial fraud and is the B.C. equivalent of the SEC. But unlike its American
counterpart, the BCSC has not taken action against any business journalist and
does not have a section in its act containing rules on journalists’ investments.
With so many brokers to monitor,
Maich and Baines say the BCSC has little
time for journalists. “Changing the letter of the law to
make tighter and more stringent rules might be effective
damage control, and it might
make managers feel better,”
Maich says, “but it doesn’t alter the spirit of the rules. All
it does is make a relatively
simple ethical principle unnecessarily complicated.”
So while this potential
money-making
scheme
seems enticing to the unethical journalist, Baines says
the truth is always bound to
surface.
“People who engage in
this sort of subterfuge quite
often leave tracks, whether
it’s cell phone records or wire
transfer records. It’s very
hard to operate an account
out of Canada or the U.S. in
the Bahamas without leaving
something.”
The potential for business
journalists to make some big
bucks is very much there, but
few cases come to light, so it’s
hard to know how prevelant
the practice really is.
One has to track back
more than two decades to
find the example of former
Wall Street Journal reporter R. Foster
Winans, who was convicted of insider
trading and mail fraud for repeatedly
leaking the contents of his Heard on the
Street columns to a stockbroker. Winans
admitted his participation in the scheme
and to earning $31,000 from it, but pleaded not guilty, arguing that his behaviour
was unethical but not criminal.
In the aftermath, a SEC official noted
that Winans was by no means the only
journalist who stood accused of law
breaking, and who brought disgrace to
journalism. (LJR)
25
Watch your step
The dangers of court reporting
J
ohn Daly, a veteran reporter for Vancouver-based Global BC,
tramps up the cold concrete steps leading up to the Supreme Court building in
26 downtown Vancouver. He has been here
many times before. Glimpses of sunshine
flicker across his face as he hurries toward the entrance. Nearby, people hustle
through the streets, but their voices and
footsteps are muffled by the strong structure of the courthouse. He pushes open
the heavy glass doors and reads a sign
that warns: Weapons, Cameras, And Recording Devices Are Strictly Prohibited.
But Daly needs no warnings. The 58year-old Bronx native is an experienced,
street-wise reporter who has covered
every news beat there is. And he knows
covering the courts has own special pit-
Story an
falls. Yes, he knows.
In June 2005, Daly covered a trial involving an undercover RCMP officer
who became chummy with a criminal
in what is commonly known as the “Mr.
Big scenario.” Despite a court-ordered
identity ban, Daly unwittingly revealed
the undercover officer’s first name in a
15-second news clip.
Unfortunately, Daly didn’t realize undercover officers often use their real first
names to avoid being exposed as frauds.
“To be honest with you, it never really
dawned on me that the first name was
covered by the ban. In fact, I don’t think
nd photo by Valerie Schillaci
the words in the ban made that perfectly clear,” he says, recalling the incident that put him through the legal
wringer.
Shortly after the news story aired
he found out about the mistake from
his lawyer Dan Burnett, who had been
contacted by an RCMP lawyer. He was
called to a meeting at RCMP division
headquarters where he apologized.
Then he made his way to the police
station to be fingerprinted. Eventually, Daly’s lawyer negotiated to have
the charges dropped. In exchange,
Daly agreed he would speak to stu-
dents at three journalism schools
about the gravity of publication bans,
especially ones designed to protect
the identity of undercover officers.
The legal process was both time
consuming and difficult, says Daly.
Global had to work around his court
ordered schedule. But he was not
alone. Amy Carmichael, who covered the same case for The Canadian
Press, breached the ban and was given the same deal. In September 2006,
Daly and Carmichael visited journalism schools at the British Columbia
Institute of Technology, the University of British Columbia and Langara
College. They showed students the
TV news story, and discussed contempt of court — the failure to obey
a court order. “Most students were
surprised you could be charged, and
it was found to be a valuable caution
for anybody reporting on the courts,”
Daly says.
Identification bans restrict journalists from reporting on anything
that could expose a person involved
in a sensitive legal case. Journalists
reporting on the courts have to be
extremely careful with identification bans; Daly’s experience is proof.
The bans, which he calls “one of the
sand traps or sink holes that exist in
the world of reporting,” is intended
to protect the safety, reputation and
well-being of a person involved in a
legal battle. The greatest challenge
for a journalist is speculating on what
identifies someone. In Daly’s case,
the first name was enough to identify
the undercover RCMP officer.
It is especially dangerous to use
names in small communities where
people know each other. In 1998, the
Nelson Daily News and one of its reporters were ordered to pay $19,000 to
a woman who was sexually assaulted
and seriously injured by a commonlaw spouse. The court had issued a
public ban on the woman’s name to
protect her identity. But the newspaper printed it anyway. The victim,
who had plans to open a business,
had to leave town because she was
ashamed fellow citizens knew of her
experience.
In some cases, even giving the
physical description of a victim, or
naming relatives can lead to problems. The Duncan Citizen was ordered to pay $10,000 in 1993 to cover
personal damages to a woman who
had been sexually abused by her
stepfather. The paper did not identify
the victim by name but did name the
stepfather, who was well-known in
the community.
Journalists who walk into a courtroom unprepared run the risk of missing the “red flags” or warnings that
trigger a journalist to be extra cautious. For instance, identity bans are
almost always in effect when it comes
to sexual assault victims, young offenders, and frequently, such as in
Daly’s case, undercover officers.
Along with identity bans, there
are restrictions to ensure the jury’s
decision isn’t swayed by information
inadmissible in court.
Reporters
can’t expose anything that happens
in the courtroom when the jury isn’t
present, or the criminal history of the
accused. Daly’s lawyer, Dan Burnett,
doesn’t agree with such broad restrictions. “We’re blindfolding the whole
population of Canada about what’s
going on in a case basically because
we don’t trust we can find 12 reasonable people,” he says.
But Robyn Elliot, a law professor
at the University of British Columbia,
says bans balance the rights of the
accused with the need for courts to
be public. He believes without bans
the media would expose too much
information, which could lead to the
death of open court system we now
have. Banned information may not
become public at the time of the trial,
but, “They [people] are going to be informed at some point.”
Elliot’s biggest fear is that criminals or anyone with a vested interest in seeing a mistrial will attend
the trial and start posting banned
information online. That possibility
makes Daly believe it is pointless to
protect the identity of an undercover
RCMP officer. “If bad guys know who
the players are they can go where the
trial is,” he says. “They can go down
there and eyeball the officers and get
the names they’re using and put it on
the Internet, but the average person
can’t read about it.”
A provincial court judge, who doesn’t
wish to be named, says “having someone in the courtroom to listen to the
evidence is based on the principle of
having courts open to the public, and
while they are welcome to listen to the
evidence, they cannot publish it. So it is
not a matter of hiding the evidence from
the public.”
Ethan Baron, who frequently covers
the courts for The Province newspaper,
understands he needs to tread carefully
27
when it comes
to court reporting.
But, he
says, aside from
the legal restrictions there are
other hurdles.
“It’s difficult to
get people [involved in a case]
to speak in a
way that represents accurately
what
they’re
going through.
They’re
usually overcome
by emotion, and
aren’t necessarily
coherent.”
He says it’s important to get
sources to clearly explain their story so
the reporter can convey it accurately.
Daly believes the Canadian judicial
Daly
now
covers
only
the occasional
court case, not
his choice. You
could say he’s
learned a lesson from his
recent experience, but he’s
not convinced
he was in the
wrong. When
asked how the
legal
limitations fit with
the journalist’s
role in society,
Daly is blunt:
“As a journaist,
you are less
than a human
being; you are less than the average person in the streets because you are a potential threat.” (LJR)
“It’s difficult to get people
to speak in a way that
represents accurately what
they’re going through.
They’re usually overcome by
emotion, and aren’t
necessarily coherent.”
system is at a crisis of credibility. “I think
[judges] need to take their heads and
bang them together, and have a powerful
discussion of why they’re so secretive.”
About the B.C. Press Council
The B.C Press Council considers complaints from the public about the
conduct of the press in the gathering and publication of news and opinion.
Who serves on Council?
The Council has 11 directors – five professional
members who are officers or employees of
member newspapers and six public members
(including the Chair) who are not in any way
associated with the press.
Who funds Council?
The Council was formed 25 years ago at the
initiative of B.C. newspaper publishers. Although
funded by member newspapers, it is at
arms-length and wholly independent of the
industry. It’s Board of Directors is weighted in
favor of the public.
British Columbia Press Council
web: bcpresscouncil.org
email: council@bcpresscouncil.org
28
How to complain
A complaint must be precisely defined and the
complainant must first attempt to settle the
issue with the newspaper.
If the complainant is not satisfied with the newspaper’s response, a formal hearing may be held to
adjudicate the dispute.
Normally, the hearing is held in public. Neither
party may be represented by counsel. After the
hearing, the Council issues a notice of ajudication. The newspaper involved is obliged to publish the ajudication.
201 Selby Street,
Nanaimo, B.C., V9R 2R1
Toll free, 1-888-687-2213
R
eporting
from the
bandwagon
S
ports reporters are often envied in the newsroom because they have
more leeway than news
reporters to play with
the angle and style of a
story. But does sports
journalism also stray
from the usual journalism tenets of balance, fairness and objectivity to appease
or even boost the hometown team? Are
sports writers inherent homers because they share the
excitement, the fervour, the
hope with the hometown
fan?
Given the proximity of sports reporters to coaches, owners, public relations
operatives and players, a blurring of
boundaries can and does occur. The
potential to be compromised is high because of their close ties with the people
they write about.
Sports reporters often travel on the
team plane, sleep in the same hotel, go
out to dinner and talk strategy with the
athletes, and are then expected to provide fair coverage of a game. Is this getting too close to your subject?
A survey of U.S. dailies, published in
the Newspapr Research Journal in 2005,
indicated that sports departments still
vary in their use of ethical codes and
professional standards. Sports editors,
especially those at small-circulation
dailies, appeared to operate by a set of
norms not acceptable in other parts of
the newsroom.
Jonathan McDonald, sports editor for
The Province newspaper, says a journal-
“
Do sports journalists give their
hometown teams a boost?
By Emily Wright
ist’s relationship with a team can be a
useful tool in getting the whole story to
the public.
“PR people represent athletes as
great people. Good writers come in who
know a lot of people and use their experience to get really good stories and expose what people are actually like.”
McDonald says sports organizations
don’t react well to criticism, but they
aren’t the only ones. Fans, he says, can
be even worse, citing the large number of
complaints the paper receives when, for
example, the coverage is critical of the
Vancouver Canucks.
We all strive for
objectivity, and we
all fail because
we’re human.
“People say we are unsupportive of
the Canucks because if they are having
a rough season or losing streak we report about it. I have been asked numerous times by outraged fans, ‘How can
you be so negative? They are our home
team.’ My response is that they may be
your team but we are sports writers. We
will commend them when they do well
and we will criticize them [when they
don’t].”
Iain MacIntyre, a Vancouver Sun
sports reporter and columnist who regularly covers the National Hockey League,
says although some fans have a hard time
reading critical reviews of their favourite
teams, their opinion of the writer makes
a difference.
“The reader’s perception is often
formed by the journalist’s perception.
There tends to be a long-term feel for the
writer as well as the team they’re covering.”
MacIntyre doesn’t deny there is a
natural tendency to root for the home
team, but he believes a reporter’s stories
should still have balance.
“Looking for fairness and evenhandedness, that’s the best you can hope for. If
we’re all being honest we probably want
to see the home team do well. But I believe that a reporter can write about the
team without compromising his or her
own integrity. There is no intent to cater
to the reader. It’s about what the compelling issue is.”
MacIntyre says he works hard to get
a good story and believes that maintaining credibility is the most
important factor to being a
well-respected writer.
“Don’t sell your soul for
a story, which can lead to a
loss of objectivity. In other words, don’t
accept favours to get a story that might
compromise you down the road. If it’s
true, you have to go with it. I make a
point of not putting myself in a position
to have myself challenged that way,” he
says.
“We all strive for objectivity, and we
all fail because we’re human. There is
such a swell of interest and support for
the team. We just have to do the best we
can.” (LJR)
”
29
Diversity
Deficit
People of colour are finally sitting in
the anchor’s chair, but why are they
still missing from print newsrooms?
G
30
Story by Ashley Bhan
eorge Wawmeesh Hamilton was fresh out of journalism school last spring when he was interviewed for a reporting job at daily. He thought the interview went well but he never received
a call informing him of his status. Hamilton is Aboriginal. And that, he believes, is why he
didn’t get the job. “What I had found out later from a friend who worked there was that the
editor said, ‘I want to be certain and clear that there’s no agenda’.”
“I took that to mean that I’m a mould for the First Nations. They think I want to do glowing Aboriginal stories,” Hamilton, 42, says while poking his finger into his chest. “Of the
people that they hired, only one was a minority.” After all the hand-wringing and so-called
affimtative action plans to bring minorities into newsrooms, are there still barriers for ethnic
journalists trying to get their foot in the door?
Institutional racism, a form of racism occurring specifically in institutions such as public
bodies, corporations and universities, could be one such barrier. Numerous studies have
J
as Johal, B.C. correspondent for
Global National, believes television and radio have advanced
more quickly than print because
of their smaller newsrooms. “The size of
personnel is so much smaller than in a
print newsroom. Generally, print newsrooms across Canada are a lot bigger. It’s
difficult, visually, to see change. It takes
longer.”
In 1990, the French-language arm of
the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio-Canada, enforced an equality
program to guide the hiring process. By
2000, members from all minority groups
rose to 4.8 per cent of total employees in
Quebec and for Aboriginal people that
number rose to 1.3 per cent — small but
significant improvements.
But why aren’t such changes evident
in print journalism? In 2000, a study by
Florian Sauvageau and David Pritchard
at Laval University found that only 2.7 per
cent of Canadian journalists in all media
belonged to a visible minority group.
In 2004, a Ryerson University study
compared diversity in print newsrooms
in 1994 to those in 2004 and concluded
that Canada’s daily newspapers continued to lag behind in hiring members of
racial minority groups. Just over 13 per
cent of the editors in the 37 papers surveyed said they had a very strong commitment to improving diversity, down
from 26 per cent in 1994.
According to the study, “racial minorities have slightly increased their presence in the field; however, the gains do
not keep up with the huge increase in
ethnic minorities in the Canadian population.” The survey showed that at the
37 papers, there were only 72 journalists
from minority backgrounds.
“
If you look
at journalism
schools across
Canada, for the
most part there
isn’t a strong
enough
representation,
visually, of
minorities in
those
classrooms.
K
“
been conducted in an effort to gauge diveristy in the newsroom but the reports
stop after 2004.
Ros Guggi, deputy editor for The
Province newspaper, in charge of hiring,
doesn’t believe the commitment toward
improving diversity in newsrooms has
disappeared. “I know that diversity is
something that we strive for at The Province. Our newsroom reflects many of the
ethnic groups found in the Lower Mainland,” she says. “We’ve made progress in
increasing the diversity in our newsroom
and know we need to do this to cover a
very multicultural community.”
Within the next few years, a significant number of journalists at The Province, many of them older, white males,
will retire. Guggi says that while there is
no formal affirmative action program at
the paper, she will have diversity in mind
when hiring replacements.
There are roughly 200 journalists of
colour working in Canadian broadcasting, many of them in television. Most of
the surge stems from the Broadcasting
Act, amended in 1991, which states that
broadcasting must “reflect the circumstances and aspirations of the multicultural and multiculturalism nature of Canadian society and the special place of
Aboriginal peoples within the society.”
atie Warfield, a journalism instructor at Kwantlen UniversityCollege who teaches media and
diversity, believes newsrooms
need to re-think diversity, especially with
Canada’s growing multicultural population. She says more ethnic journalists
are going into TV and radio because
that’s what TV and radio are looking for.
“There’s only so much you can tell from
a byline in print. It’s not visual compared
to TV.”
Vancouver is a city known nationally
and worldwide for its multiculturalism.
With the popularization of the affirmative action program, which prioritizes
minority candidates, the ethical question
is whether it’s appropriate to hire people
based on the colour of their skin over
their skill set.
Warfield believes the affirmative action program is significant to Canadian
culture, but it’s treading dangerous waters. “There are two sides to it. We face
this two-way street when it comes to
implementing these programs.” The twoway street she’s talking about raises concerns about the issue of prejudice when
implementing an affirmative action program. Companies and businesses that
favour hiring certain groups of people
could be seen as having a bias. Likewise,
disqualifying Caucasian candidates up
for the same positions can be considered
discrimination.
Warfield feels any program to hire
more ethnic journalists would reflect the
diverse culture and thus would be a step
in the right direction. “If there’s already
a white anchor, and an Asian anchor gets
hired over another white anchor, I don’t
see that as a problem.”
But Jenna Kelsey, a 19-year-old second-year journalism student at Kwantlen,
believes it’s unfair for white journalists
to be overlooked based on race. She fears
an affirmative action policy could leave
her out in the cold.
“More recently, television stations
have been hiring a more ethnically diverse staff,” Kelsey says. “I think now
more than ever it’s harder to get on television being a Caucasian because newsrooms are trying harder to incorporate
ethnic backgrounds.”
The Ryerson study indicated that betweeen 1994 and 2004 there was a 50 per
cent drop in commitment by newsroom
managers to hire more people of colour.
The common justification was “that minority groups just don’t apply here.”
Guggi says her newsroom faces the same
problem. She doesn’t get enough applications from qualified people of colour.
“It takes a long time to change the
makeup of a newsroom when you aren’t
doing a lot of hiring each year,” Guggi
says. Warfield agrees. “I think we should
flip the camera around and show it from
the point of view of the ethnic reporter.
It’s too simple to say that there is some
form of racism going on. It’d be very
tough to prove. More needs to be done
to encourage them to apply instead of
pointing fingers saying editors aren’t
hiring people of colour.”
“If you don’t have trained journalists
of diverse backgrounds, then you don’t
31
have anyone to hire. You have to look at
the grassroots level.” She suggests taking a closer look at journalism schools,
not only newsrooms. “If you look at
schools, not newsrooms. “If you look at
journalism schools across Canada, for
the most part there isn’t a strong enough
representation, visually, of minorities
in those classrooms. We have to look at
why that is.”
Warfield speculates that immigration
plays a factor in how young minorities
decide whether or not to pursue journalism. She believes that if young minorities
are being raised in a household where
their parents are entrepreneurs and
make a lot of money, they will be driven
to pursue profit seeking jobs.
“Let’s face it, you’re not in journalism for the money,” she says. “Here at
Kwantlen, if you look at the business
department it’s predominantly Asian
compared to the journalism department
which is predominantly white.”
Johal agrees with Warfield’s theory.
“Immigrant parents aren’t exactly forcing or encouraging their kids to head
into journalism because they don’t see it
has being a successful, rich and rewarding career.”
Some journalism schools are trying to
increase diversity in the classroom. The
school of journalism at the University of
Regina offered a diversity workshop for
Aboriginal and visible minority students
taking general studies courses in early
2007. The workshop provided the students with a hands-on learning session
with professional news reporters, with
the aim of promoting journalism as a career. There was a mock news conference,
a writing session and a chance to experiment with page layout and photos.
The coordinator of the workshop, Leonzo Barreno, wrote in a press release
that today’s media outlets need to reflect
the cultural differences within their communities. He added that by holding diversity workshops at journalism schools,
more ethnic minorities will be attracted
to the field, which in turn makes it easier
for media outlets to hire qualified people
of colour.
“Because of our province’s everchanging demographics, it’s important
to have different cultural backgrounds
and experiences within a newsroom,”
Barreno says.
Guggi believes that qualified ethnic
journalists need to step forward and apply. “We get a limited number of applications from journalists of colour who have
the previous experience we require. We
require them to work at a small paper,
32
Jas Johal is Global National’s
only male Indo-Canadian
correspondent
Photo illustration by Valerie Schillaci
along with having strong reporting and
writing skills. I am confident the number of qualified applicants will increase
as more journalism graduates of colour
progress through the ranks.”
So while ethnic representation in
print newsrooms still lags behind television’s, Hamilton rightly points out that
Canadian print newsrooms have been
traditionally white and have had much
farther to go. He believes it will take
more than a decade or two to see a significant change.
“It’s going to take time,” Hamilton
says. “Diversity is still in its infancy. It
needs to be given time to grow.” (LJR)
C
n
ste
on
ti
tra
s
Illu
b
ASE
OF
MISSING
INVESTIGATORS
a
em
ri
yK
THE
d
Mie
THE
Can in-depth reporting survive newsroom budget cuts?
By Benjamin Alldritt
J
ournalism is a profession under
siege. Reporters in the 21st century find themselves pressed on
all sides: by newsmakers, whose
obstructive and manipulative skills have
never been sharper; by employers who
increasingly value efficiency of production over quality of public service; and
by a public that is turning to non-professional, web-based news sources. These
evolutionary pressures are redefining
the media ecosystem – many traditional
jobs will be changed, some journalistic
niches may be wiped out altogether.
When an ecosystem changes, often the
most visible effects are seen on the large
predators – in journalism, these are the
investigative reporters. Like polar bears
and great white sharks, their numbers
are collapsing as their environment
changes around them.
News has always been a business. It
costs money to operate a newspaper or
television station, and ownership has
always had to find ways to pay the bills,
by charging their audience, or selling
advertising space.
Conflict between
journalistic ideals and commercial interests is ancient and inevitable. But
the “earners” and the “burners” usually
find some middle ground as both realize
their dependence on the other. Editors
and reporters know that their pay comes
largely from advertising revenue, and
the ad department understand that its
clients won’t buy space in a paper nobody reads.
For many decades, journalism was in-
sulated from the worst ravages of corporate culture by the structure of the media
industry. Until recently, there was genuine commercial competition between
media outlets. Scooping a rival newspaper was not just good journalism, it was
good business. After the Washington
Post dominated coverage of the Watergate Scandal in the early 1970s, editors
at the New York Times asked for and received the resources to set up dedicated
investigative teams. Beyond this, ownership of many of the most distinguished
newspapers was retained by families,
such as the Grahams at the Washington
Post and the Bancrofts at the Wall Street
Journal. While certainly not blind to financial interests, these families valued
quality journalism, and often allowed
33
Will investigative
reporters become
an extinct species?
34
Illustration by
Caitlin Russell
their newspapers to run at a loss. The
Bancrofts endured more than a decade of
heavy losses at the Wall Street Journal.
The Bancrofts ultimately sold the Journal to Rupert Murdoch in 2007, where it
will join dozens of other newspapers and
broadcasters from around the world in
the News Corporation stable.
In Canada, media ownership is notoriously concentrated. This lack of real
competition has disconnected excellence
in journalism from commercial success.
From the point of view of ownership, it
is largely immaterial whether a story
is broken by the Vancouver Sun or The
Province or Global TV. For an
editor, investigative journalism is a high-risk, high-reward
proposition. A major story,
such as the disappearance of
dozens of women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside,
requires drawing from scarce
resources. And not every investigative rainbow has a pot
of gold at the other end.
“I have never turned down
an investigative journalism
proposal,” says Kirk LaPointe,
managing editor at The Vancouver Sun. “When there’s an
idea, we find the time. But it
doesn’t mean they’ve all been
published.”
The Vancouver Sun dedicated three experienced reporters
to the missing women story for
four months, and it became one
of the most notorious criminal
cases in Canadian history. But
even if the Sun’s efforts lured
readers away from its CanWest
cousins, the net revenue for the
corporate family is left largely
unchanged. It is, therefore, difficult to justify the cost of extended investigations, let alone
dedicated investigative teams.
“Some people think we do
this on the cheap,” LaPointe
says. “We don’t. We spend a lot of money
on longer-form journalism.”
But in order to convince an editor to
commit resources, a reporter must either chance upon a striking piece of evidence or invest a great deal of personal
time in building the case. Lindsay Kines
was one of three reporters who pursued
what became the Robert Pickton story.
He did invest a great deal of his own time
in the story, building the case to devote
more resources to it. “And that’s alright
for younger reporters,” says Kines. “But
the more experienced people also have
families and other demands on their
time; it gets to be very hard to juggle.”
Newsrooms are slimming budgets
and shedding staff, but the paper or
newscast still has to be filled. As the
CBC’s Stephen Quinn put it, “We have
a big, braying, merciless news goat that
we have to feed every hour.” The need
to have something, anything, to file before deadline trumps the desire, however
genuinely felt, to dig deeper. “It’s easy
to fall into that straightforward actionreaction-comment process,” says Quinn.
As a result, reporters gravitate towards
events that are easily translated into for-
“
a lot of mileage out of simply going to
the courthouse. Because it’s hard NOT
to get a story there. If there’s nothing in
one courtroom, then you just cruise over
to the next. It’s not quite fish in barrel,
but…well, yeah it is.”
A study conducted by Trudie Richards and Denel Rehberg-Sedo at Halifax’s
Mount Saint Vincent University examined diversity of sources in newspapers.
They looked at sources for randomly selected stories on the front pages of the
Globe and Mail and the National Post between 1998 and 2003. The Globe yielded
149 stories, the Post 152. The researchers
divided sources into three
categories: “routine channels,” such as news releases, news conferences,
speeches, and comment
from spokepersons; “informal channels,” such as
leaks, interviews with officials other than spokespersons, and information
from other journalists;
and finally “enterprise
channels,” which include
independent
research,
events the reporter actually witnessed, and
interviews with figures
speaking without official
permission. At the Globe
and Mail, enterprise stories accounted for only 13
per cent of front page coverage. At the Post, it was
11 per cent. Routine channels provided more than
two-thirds of the stories
for both national newspapers.
The Vancouver Sun
conducted a similar study,
and arrived at an enterprise percentage figure
“less than 20, but safely
into double digits,” according to LaPointe.
Those who make the
news – government officials, business
leaders and public figures – understand
this very well. Their public relations people know how to play on the weakness of
the modern newsroom.
Governments in particular have become adept at rewarding superficiality and frustrating investigation. Pick
up a government press release and it
will read like a news story, with a nice
crisp lead, supporting paragraphs and
quotes. Often a separate “backgrounder” is thoughtfully attached to bring the
If there’s an issue in all of
journalism it is that there
is far, far more of an
opportunity now to have
news staged for you, and
for you to simply lurch
from staged opportunity to
staged opportunity.
”
mulaic stories. A cab ride and a few
phone calls can put a car crash on the
front page, but an unannounced shift in
government policy might take a substantial amount of research and investigation to understand, let alone report on.
LaPointe condemns this practice.
“A weak assignment editor, or department head, is able to paper over their
sub-competence by simply looking at
‘Menu A’ of opportunities, ‘Roster B’ of
available staff, and simply drawing lines
between them. That happens in a lot of
newsrooms. A lot of our competitors get
35
reporter up to speed on a complex issue. Call a press office and the voice at
the other end will boil down the news to
a few pithy quotes, easily plugged into
the top of a news story. As reporters are
asked to process an ever-greater number
of stories under deadline pressure, the
temptation to “re-gift” these neatly prepackaged stories becomes hard to resist.
“If there’s an issue in all of journalism it is that there is far, far more of an
opportunity now to have news staged
for you and for you to simply lurch from
staged opportunity to staged opportunity,
LaPointe says. “It’s absolutely true that,
unlike the old days, PR specialists and special interests,
who largely employ former
journalists, are much more effective at framing a story. It’s
a great pitched battle. At the
Sun, I think we win more than
we lose. I don’t think all media
win more than they lose. Quite
a few media simply work in the
realm of the public domain and
just ‘receive the wisdom.’”
Reporters who want to get
out of the message box and
past the press release often
seek original government
documents through Freedom
of Information requests. Indeed the art of the FOI request
is one of the hallmarks of an
experienced journalist. But
almost everyone who has used
this method has a raft of horror stories. Requests are processed at a painfully slow rate,
sometimes reducing their
utility in news stories. Some
come back with a staggeringly
large search and copying fee.
Others are honoured by one
government department but
not another. Increasingly, FOI
requests are either turned
down or return heavily edited documents. In the fall of
2007, Kines was working at the Victoria
Times-Colonist and requested an internal report from the provincial Ministry
of Children and Families. The report
was extensively censored, but the visible
portions suggested the government was
making progress with its Sexual Abuse
Intervention Program. Kines managed
to acquire an uncensored copy through
another channel, and learned that the
report actually damned the ministry for
the inadequate funding and low priority
afforded to the program. Kines deserves
credit for obtaining a true copy, but the
episode leaves one wondering how many
other embarrassing government documents go unseen without anyone being
any the wiser. “I send in a bunch when
I have a moment,” he said. “I would say
you get what you asked for maybe once
every 20 requests.”
One of the lawmakers who first assembled the Freedom of Information
legislation is Colin Gabelmann. Fifteen
years after its enactment, Gabelmann
denounced the mechanism as a failure.
He said a deliberate lack of staffing and
sweeping interpretations of exemptions
had “throttled” the spirit of the laws.
“
As journalists,
we haven’t
been very
effective in
convincing
people that the
right to know is
a very important
right.
36
”
Over at The Sun, LaPointe believes there
is enough blame to go around.
“As journalists, we haven’t been very
effective in convincing people that the
right to know is a very important right.
Maybe people are bombarded with so
much information that it anesthetizes
them into thinking that there is a lot of
disclosure. But all journalists have to accept some responsibility for the dysfunction of the legislation. There are newsrooms that just don’t do any of this work.
I don’t know how you can collect your
paycheque as a journalist and not make
any effort to get original information.”
As a tool for obtaining original information and distributing news, the impact
of the Internet on journalism can hardly
be overstated. Once the sole preserve of
large media firms, a global distribution
network is now available to virtually anyone on the planet at negligible cost. The
rise of blogs and sites such as YouTube
has prompted some to question if professional journalism itself is endangered.
The effect of the Internet on investigative journalism is complex; even as in
threatens the economic viability of traditional news outlets, it opens new avenues
of inquiry and sources of information to reporters. Already, reputable newspapers, including the
Vancouver Sun, have published
articles that cite Wikipedia as
their source. How long can newspapers glean information from the
web and then charge readers to
publish it on bundles of paper and
truck them around the city when
the web is available constantly
and without cost?
“We’re not really a newspaper
culture here anymore. We’re a
web-first culture,” says LaPointe.
“We publish pretty much everything online first. When the hockey game ends, probably within 10
or 15 minutes, we’ll have our first
story on the web. That’s changed
the culture, no question. Reporters have to treat online as their
first draft.”
Many routine assignments
could be dropped from traditional
newspapers; the cost of “covering”
them is simply not worth it when
hordes of “citizen journalists”
have already uploaded video and
amateur analysis to the web. The
strongest remaining profit centre
will be driven by “uncovering” information. This is where investigative journalists may come into
their own. The web can provide
a flood of high-speed, low-depth news,
but only a paid professional can offer indepth research and context.
These are times of profound transition
for all journalists. Those in the investigative reporting business are torn between
the strictures of an outdated economic
news model and the demands of the Information Age. But the opportunities
that come with this age will ultimately
give skilled investigators huge advantages. As the industry evolves, they may yet
survive, adapt, and flourish.
(LJR)
VOTER-FUNDED MEDIA
(continued from page 11)
The 2008 AMS elections were the
second time out for Voter-Funded Media. Eleven media outlets paid the $150
entrance fee, down from 13 in 2007. This
year’s top winner was campus newspaper The Knoll, with the blog UBC Insiders and debating society newspaper The
Devil’s Advocate rounding out the top
three.
“This is what I called the turbo,” says
Latham. “It’s a feedback loop that builds
up the strength of the whole system. You
vote for better media, which helps you
vote for better politicians, and keep an
eye on them once they’re in office.”
The Simon Fraser Student Society is
also introducing the idea, and Latham
is in talks with Langara and Kwantlen
Colleges’ student unions. Once he has a
number of student examples up and running, the economist-turned-democraticreformer wants to scale up to the municipal level and beyond.
But why do we need VFM off-campus,
where media consumers already vote
with their dollars? Don’t sales figures
already tell media if they’re doing a good
job? To understand VFM’s role, says
STREET PAPERS
(continued from page 23)
anyone, sell on private property, deal in
drugs or stolen property while selling
the paper or appear intoxicated on the
job, but Condon says the rules need to be
flexible.
“The drug and alcohol one is interesting,” he says. “Some of the vendors will
have drug dependency issues, they need
it to function day to day…and frankly
some guys are much more pleasant to
deal with when they’ve had a drink, so
there has to be some leniency.”
It is this kind of acceptance of people’s
often difficult and complicated lives that
makes street papers such a valuable employment model. As Condon points out,
most employers would fire someone if
they showed up for work after spending
a night on the street or couldn’t come in
because of the chronic illnesses associated with life below the poverty line.
“With Street Corner, [the vendors]
are independent business people. They
work the hours that suit them and they
are in charge of themselves. It’s a low
threshold entry point into employment
and that’s really the key to street papers:
providing people with the opportunity to
make their lives better.”
For now, the paper is a labour of love
for Condon and its five directors. They
Latham, you have to distinguish between
private goods and public ones.
“The thing you would pay for out of
your own pocket is different from what
you would vote to pay for as a group,” he
argues. “We do not expect individuals to
pay for public goods voluntarily.”
“The same people who buy People
Magazine at the checkout and want to
read about celebrities, they will vote to
spend collective money for in-depth analysis of the tax system and how it should
be improved. Totally boring – they don’t
want to read it, but I think they realize
it’s important.”
Though he acknowledges it might be
a tough sell at city halls, Latham hopes
to have a municipal level example within
two years. He also hopes to find additional sponsors to help provide the initial
prizes.
“Anyone who uses the rhetoric of democracy should support this,” says Matthew Naylor. Despite losing his race in
this year’s VFM-scrutinized election, the
political science student is adamant that
voter-funded media find a place in higher
levels of government.
“I think it can, I think it will, and I
definitely think it should.” (LJR)
all volunteer their time to put the paper
out on schedule, write grant proposals
and raise funds. Vendors buy the paper
for 50 cents per copy, which covers printing costs, and the UPS Store on West
Hastings donates its services as a distribution centre.
Ads aren’t a priority, Condon says.
The focus now is to get new people buying and reading a paper that he says covers issues affecting all Vancouverites.
“That’s what the Big Issue did; they
saw a need for good entertainment coverage in London and they filled that gap.
Vancouver needs independent, in-depth
journalism and I hope we can provide
that.”
He says hopes to one day hire staff
reporters, but until then he will have
to rely on contributors who believe in
Street Corner and will work for free.
While Condon works on improving
the paper’s content, Richard is still working his beat.
Several people who pause outside the
liquor store to buy copies of the paper
stay and chat despite the spitting rain.
They talk about the weather, the paper,
the upcoming holidays. It is obvious from
their relaxed smiles and easy chatter
that Richard is a welcome part of their
daily lives.
Mark Latham is bringing his
Voter-Funded Media
project to a college
or city hall near you.
“My back’s too old for construction,”
Richard says of his job. “Sellin’ papers?
It’s a living. I got a cheap room, don’t
drink, don’t smoke, shop for bargains.”
With a grin he pulls out two thick pork
chops from his bag.
“Butcher on Hastings always has
something on sale; got these for a dollar
each. Other guys, guys who drink and
take drugs — they need more money
than I do.”
Richard survives on the money he
earns selling the paper. He says he
doesn’t need to collect welfare, that he
can earn enough on his own.
There is a steady stream of customers
going in and out of the liquor store. On
the opposite side of the building a man in
a cowboy hat busks for change.
A ragged couple argue while sorting
cans and bottles from an overflowing
shopping cart. Richard considers the
scene, shakes his head and goes back to
his work.
“Get your copy of Street Corner,” he
calls out into the gathering dark. (LJR)
Since this article was written,
Street Corner has changed its name
to Megaphone and added 8 full-colour
pages to every issue.
37
Issues
A
G
eNde
majority of graduates from journalism schools across Canada
are women. But that majority
isn’t found in the newsroom, and
it certainly isn’t reflected in the top editorial postions.
At the start of 2008, 70 per cent of journalism students at the University of British Columbia and Kwantlen University
College were female. At Carleton University in Ottawa, 77 per cent of journalism
students were female, and at Concordia
University in Montreal, there were an estimated 65 to 70 per cent.
But these numbers aren’t reflected
at the top. In newsrooms, there are still
many more male editors-in-chief than female. Looking at the 32 newspapers with
the largest circulations across Canada,
only five women hold the top position.
Why so few?
One likely factor is that women bear
children, and this can affect their career
path.
“Women still have the major responsibility of childrearing,” said Lucinda
Chodan, editor-in-chief of the Victoria
Times-Colonist.
“Journalism has such irregular hours.
You think you have a day that ends at 6
p.m. and then a large news story breaks
and you can’t go. If you have kids it is
very difficult to do this job. You never
know when you’ll be home.”
Chodan has been editor-in-chief for
three years, and previously worked as
a deputy editor at the Montreal Gazette
and as a senior editor, assistant manager
and feature editor at various other newspapers.
She does not have children, but understands the demands such a demanding position can put on family life.
“My husband is very patient. We try
38
R
a
B
m
I
J-schools vs. Newsrooms
to dedicate time every week together,”
she said.
Daphne Bramham, a columnist for the
Vancouver Sun, agrees that choosing to
have children can be an obstacle when
you’re trying to grab a managerial position.
“For women who are the primary caregivers, of course it’s a problem. Newspapers aren’t very forgiving because of
daily deadlines.”
“If it’s your children’s Christmas concert, or if they are sick, it doesn’t matter,”
she adds.
A 2006 General Social Survey conducted by Statistics Canada reported
that men are increasingly taking a leave
of absence from work to welcome home
their new baby boy or girl.
But while 90 per cent of fathers returned to work shortly afterwards, only
60 per cent of mothers did so.
And when women do return to work,
they can find it a difficult experience.
Eight out of every 10 women reported
their return as being stressful or very
stressful.
In contrast, the majority of fathers
described going back to work as not too
stressful or not stressful at all.
Kirk LaPointe, managing editor of
E
c
N
a
L
by Hollie Latulippe
the Vancouver Sun, agrees the demands
of raising children makes women more
hesitant to grab that top job.
“As you age, you will often start raising a family,” he said. “It either interrupts careers or sidetracks them.”
At the Calgary Herald, a daycare was
built 20 years ago to accommodate the
demand of female journalists with children.
Genderwise, the Herald newsroom
has an equal amount of women and men.
Ron Newell, recently retired executive
editor of the Herald, said the daycare
helps promote women to both work and
raise families.
LaPointe believes that initiatives such
as this “make a huge difference.”
But raising children isn’t the only
obstacle women might face when working up the career ladder. Bramham says
sometimes women can’t break into the
“old boys’ club.”
“There are very few of these [senior]
positions, so competition is hard. And I
think it is still easier for senior management to choose people they are comfortable with, and these people look like
them. They are usually white men,” she
says.
“Even though we are 50 per cent of
the population, we are not represented
as well as we should be.”
Bramham, who has been an editorial
page editor and the Asian Pacific reporter for the Sun, says there is a long battle
ahead for women journalists.
“I’ve been a journalist since 1978. I
have worked for one of the few women
editor-in-chiefs. The battle is not over.”
She adds: “If you want to stand out,
work harder than all the guys. Ask, are
you willing to make the sacrifices?”
(LJR)
New Ideas
New Advertisers
New Revenue
400 Newspaper Partners Worldwide
200 – 1727 West Broadway, Vancouver, BC, V5C 1M8
(604) 638-3800
www.cityxpress.com
39
Creative & Applied Arts
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Langara College
Liberal Arts & Languages
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www.langara.bc.ca

Street Papers - Langara College

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